On: Ask HN: Why is the 40-comment penalty being applie...

[keyle]

Interesting, I didn't know about that penalty.

Should it factor the overall down-voting of comments as part of the equation?

[minimaxir → keyle]

Flame wars don't necessarily mean low-quality comments, so tracking downvotes wouldn't be helpful.

Unless perhaps you incorporated a normalized measure of # downvotes vs. # upvotes in a thread.