The author links to a previous post with graphs with the answer. Roughly, there’s a controversy flag that gets enabled when comments are greater than upvotes,

The author links to a previous post with graphs with the answer. Roughly, there’s a controversy flag that gets enabled when comments are greater than upvotes, with limits. Looks like that’s what happened to the author’s posts. I’ve seen this happen to many interesting posts and not a big fan, but this is connected to a business after all.