HN heavily penalizes stories where the comment threads have large amounts of conflict and upvote/downvote wars. The automated lowering of the article rank has n

HN heavily penalizes stories where the comment threads have large amounts of conflict and upvote/downvote wars. The automated lowering of the article rank has nothing to do with HN caring about the subject matter of the article and everything to do with HN's software penalizing the combative nature of the discussion about the article. HN does this because it helps maintain the high level of discussion seen elsewhere on the site.