I have this habit of reading through many replies to a thread before I will respond. At the course of reading through few pages of a thread before replying, I discovered that;
- The earliest replies get more attention and earn more merit
- Some of the replies from pages 3 upwards are repetition of what others said in pages 1 and 2.
- I also understood that some of the quality contributors sometimes arrive late and their replies get buried easily
You're thinking this way about early replies having all the attention because when a user opens a thread it's the first page that appears and due to this you feel they get more attention than others which for me it's not true. There are users that still move through page to pages taking their time to read replies/opinions of different members about a topics and am saying this because I have had replies that still got merited even at 5-7 pages upwards and other person's can attest to this for themselves too.
For research purposes and scholarly benefits a good reader must know that great treasures are not hidden on the surface and therefore must dig deep to get the best therefore for people that knows what they want they can't just rely on the first two or three pages of a thread they will hence dig deeper to more pages (and I thinks that's how a good number of my replies received the merits they got).
Quality can't be hidden from those that take time to look for it. So where on a page it falls on doesn't really count.
I therefore propose that, if possible, the arrangement of replies to a thread should be based on the number of merits that reply earned in that very thread. This will tend to sort the quality replies to appear in the first page no matter what time it was made. Even if the reply appeared on page 7, just 1 merit to that reply will send it to page 1. This will also help researchers to meet the most relevant posts in the first page, without having to search through tones o replies.
This sounds good to me but it may not go well with some other persons, I decided to drop the suggestion here. Although, I don't know much about the SMF version of the forum, but with the way people complain about it, it seems it doesn't allow some certain things to be incorporated to the forum.
If replies should be arranged in the very pattern as you've suggested it would worsen the monotonous replies you earlier complained about in the preceding statement under number 2 of your discovery.
And this could make replies boring having no variety of taste as everyone will want his reply to be at the first two pages which will make almost 95% of replies in a thread align more on the ideas that appears on the first two pages believing it will get to receive merits as those that are already in the first 2 pages did.
And indirectly we will unknowingly be promoting merit phishing in the forum if such idea is given relevance as a criteria to sorting out quality post. Because the question is, who determines a quality post? It's still debatable as to who on the grounds that it's a subjective matter.