It's very rare that there is a huge volume (>100 comments) of insight provoked by a single article, just because there's not usually that much insight to be had

It's very rare that there is a huge volume (>100 comments) of insight provoked by a single article, just because there's not usually that much insight to be had in the first place on that topic, and you can be sure that 100 separate comments didn't have it all on the same thread. You usually can only get that much noise on a topic by poking people such that they NEED to correct some injustice done by the article. Sometimes good articles poke people like this, but in either case the comment thread ends up sucking.