I just had a look at http://www.reddit.com/user/Glorificus/comments/?sort=controversial and it seems to me that the algorithm used for sorting by controversy could use a little tweaking. For example, the top comment on that link is +15/-14 and the second is +102/-101, which I would consider more controversial. The eighth on the list is +65/-68, which IMHO should outrank all but the second one.

So here is my suggestion for improvement: when sorting by controversial, calculate a score for the item (comment or link) as the number of its votes minus the absolute of the net vote and sort by that. So +102/-101 gets the score 202 (102+101-abs(102-101) = 202), +15/-14 scores 28, and +65/-68 scores 130.

EDIT: I found the spot in the code, currently, it's

return float(ups + downs) / max(abs(score(ups, downs)), 1)

suggested change:

return float(ups + downs) - abs(score(ups, downs))

Hypothetically speaking, how would I go about submitting a patch?

EDIT 2: Here is a comparison of suggested approaches and resulting controversy scores:

I used 0.1 and 0.5 as constants for samsung's and robosatan's algorithms respectively. I also modified robosatan's algorithm by dividing 1 by his score and safeguarding against the case when both ups and downs are 0, which made it IMHO the winner:

1/(max(ups + downs, 1)^(alpha - min(ups, downs)/max(ups, downs, 1)))

samsung's algorithm, independent of the constant's value does not distinguish between +100/-100 and +1/-1 or any two items where the difference between ups and downs is identical.