> Anything with greater than 40 comments gets an automatic penalty. That's not quite right. Anything with >= 40 comments AND more comments than upvotes gets th

> Anything with greater than 40 comments gets an automatic penalty. That's not quite right. Anything with >= 40 comments AND more comments than upvotes gets the controversy penalty. Both conditions need to be true. An article with tons of comments will have NO controversy penalty as long as there are more votes than comments. For most articles, there are more votes than comments, so commenting will not harm the article's rank. (I wrote the recent article analyzing HN ranking.)