Thanks for the excellent link. Quite a good read. From the article: [In order to prevent flamewars on Hacker News, articles with "too many" comments will get he

Thanks for the excellent link. Quite a good read. From the article: [In order to prevent flamewars on Hacker News, articles with "too many" comments will get heavily penalized as "controversial"....] Ok, that isn't exactly even a slightly sophisticated method that could be extended to decide some comments are "high quality". In theory if you wanted to implement article ranking you need a method that ranks articles based on comment quality. Without a automated method you are really just using humans to do the ranking.