A social networking system maintains various content items with one or more content items associated with comments provided by social networking system users. When a user requests a content item associated with one or more comments, the social networking system determines likelihoods of the user performing a type of interaction with the one or more comments based on characteristics of the comments. For example, the social networking system determines likelihoods of the user requesting to view one or more of the comments. Based on the determined likelihoods, the social networking system generates an instruction describing presentation of comments. The instruction may identify a set of comments for presentation along with the content item that are selected based on the determined likelihoods.