IIRC HN threads have historically gotten dinged for having a large number of comments, relative to their upvotes. This is supposed to dampen threads that are j

IIRC HN threads have historically gotten dinged for having a large number of comments, relative to their upvotes. This is supposed to dampen threads that are just flame-bait without being particularly interesting. So posting 27 comments about "why is this thread not higher up???" just makes the problem worse :-)