How to display top 1% of the comments on a website as the first comments shown to the user?

This is a common problem with websites that uses signalling scores to decide where to display the comments. The top comments would have very high score, the score will drop very fast when descending to lower ranked comments, hence the first comment has a very high score, it is easy to tell, what is the top 1% of the comments, even without knowing the number of comments. <br><br>On the other hand, a website without such a signalling score, the 1% is signalling scores belong to the top 1% of the number of comments. How to determine without knowing the number of comments?. <br><br>One possible answer is by sorting comments by the time it was posted, descending, then using regular signalling score algorithm.