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Negativity always seems to find its way to the top, giving way to Gresham's Law, giving way to Godwin's Law (this one less often), and all the others between and beyond. The comment shuffler exists to remove any community biases that establish comment popularity. This way, a user can read a random sample of comments without needing to scroll to an arbitrary point in the comment tree.
Click the extension icon to shuffle the HN comment tree. Parent and child nodes are shuffled together. Click it again or refresh the page to set the original order. The extension gives no indication that the comments are out of original order.