HN Comments-to-Points Penalty

I think more comments than points is a negative rank factor on HN. Probably because it unmasks the submission as argument fuel for HNers.

IIRC, commenting actually counteracts voting in HN's ranking algorithm.

I'm guessing the HN algorithm does not like posts that get more comments than points.

Way more comments than upvotes is a negative signal for the ranking.

i noticed that too. i think it has. i've seen comments with fewer points higher than posts with more points and such.

Aren't posts with more comments than points downweighted?

HN downweights posts automatically based on the rate of commenting. High commenting rates makes the post less visible because it tends to be controversial and therefore not great reading for HN

This is my school of thought; it would be nice to know which are the hot comments. Previously you could skim through only the higher rated ones if you were in a hurry, but now you sort of have to trawl through masses of text to find the gems.One idea i thought might help the whole points vs. no points situation is changing karma from being the total points over all posts to just being the average points over all posts, so then people will be motivated to create fewer high-quality posts to boo

Stop showing people other people's comment scores. They stimulate argumentative comments.

Isn't there a something built into the ranking where lots of comments gets ranked lower in the page? Something to make argumentive posts lower. Maybe I'm misrembering