I've always been interested in seeing a statistic that shows how often the top comment is a negative comment that attempts to controvert the original story.
Didn't someone try to run stats on this recently? Maybe it was the post that announced the same HN dataset was on BigQuery? I recall that some people weren't convinced by the accuracy of the sentiment analysis of the top comments though. I'll see if I can find it.
Edit: I think this[1] is it: "Hacker News as a case study to test the wisdom of the crowd theory". Not quite what you were asking, but you might find it interesting.
Edit: I think this[1] is it: "Hacker News as a case study to test the wisdom of the crowd theory". Not quite what you were asking, but you might find it interesting.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10412465