zlacker

>>jseip+(OP)
This article was more interesting than I anticipated. While I admire the tinkering which goes on with moderation here in an attempt to keep discussion civil and interesting, sometimes it has counter-productive effects. In particular this rule doesn't seem to work very well:

In order to prevent flamewars on Hacker News, articles with too many comments will get heavily penalized as controversial. In the published code, the contro-factor function kicks in for any post with more than 20 comments and more comments than upvotes.

Is a vigorous discussion bad? Should everyone commenting also upvote?

>>grey-a+C01
My personal heuristic for reading is "if more comments than upvotes, don't bother". Such posts usually have a lot of repetitive, obvious comments -- typically bike-shedding, people trading anecdotes, etc.

Some specific examples might be questions that touch on child-rearing, or college experiences, or city-of-residence questions. Everyone knows next to nothing (sample size 1) but feels compelled to share. It's not information-dense enough to bother with.