Post that have more comments than points, for example, get massively deranked rather quickly.
The reason this is done is to remove from the front page hot-button topics (i.e. controversial political news), but often this also includes friendly, niche posts with vibrant conversation, which is very sad to see. These tend to have < 1 upvote/comment ratio than most "Generic tech-adjacent news" like "Apple releases new iPhone".
For example, the Ask HN I posted a few hours ago suffered the same fate: https://hnrankings.info/39788649/: from #13 on the frontpage, to 3rd page in minutes.
Last time I saw it happen on a lovely post about Forth and its various implementations over the decades — not really at risk of flame wars, but alas.
Lately, my gut feel (not based on data analysis) is that there are more people commenting without upvoting than there used to be. I wonder whether that's true.
The reason this is done is to remove from the front page hot-button topics (i.e. controversial political news), but often this also includes friendly, niche posts with vibrant conversation, which is very sad to see. These tend to have < 1 upvote/comment ratio than most "Generic tech-adjacent news" like "Apple releases new iPhone".
For example, the Ask HN I posted a few hours ago suffered the same fate: https://hnrankings.info/39788649/: from #13 on the frontpage, to 3rd page in minutes.
Last time I saw it happen on a lovely post about Forth and its various implementations over the decades — not really at risk of flame wars, but alas.