Personally I think "generate healthy discussion" should be the goal of all HN threads, which is why I think comment-count penalties are unproductive. How do you

Personally I think "generate healthy discussion" should be the goal of all HN threads, which is why I think comment-count penalties are unproductive. How do you tell the difference between "vigorous debate" and a "flame war"? If the algorithm utilized NLP to analyze the tenor of the discussion, that would be one thing, but upvotes vs. comment count is a troubling metric. I want to read threads where people are passionately discussing a topic with long back-and-forth debates. If that's a "flame war" then I'd like more flame wars, please.