[Deimorz]

That post has more comments than votes, which seems to be a factor that HN's ranking system uses to push posts off the front page faster. I think that's a terrible decision that punishes posts that generate a lot of discussion, but it seems to be how it works.

[dang]

We get notified every time a post gets that penalty, and we review them all and restore most of the better ones. I'm not sure the Rails thread is one, but will take another look.

Edit: the article seems borderline for HN but the discussion is quite good, so we'll turn the penalty off. It's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17355187.

[yorwba]

Discussion without corresponding upvotes usually indicates that people didn't like the original article that much and are mostly commenting to complain or rebut.

[NikolaNovak]

But... doesn't more votes with few comments just mean people like or agree with the idea/title, but might not even have read it and it doesn't generate meaningful discussion? :-/

I find that trivially true statement, or those that seeming to appeal to our values / beliefs, get a lot of upvotes without people even following the link, let alone contributing thoughtful comments. Whereas I come to HN to read insightful comments almost more than underlying articles - I find it fascinating when an Apollo engineer or a ML researcher or a physicist etc contribute their perspective on a topic :)

[Deimorz]

Not necessarily. Any individual user can only upvote once, but can leave many comments. So if any sort of conversation happens where the same users are posting multiple comments, that effectively ends up penalizing the overall post.

I understand the idea behind it, but I don't think it works very well in practice. It works sometimes, but I've also seen it kill plenty of posts that were totally fine.

[ams6110]

It's funny. I'll almost never vote on the topic itself, even if I comment and vote on other comments. I guess I should try to remember to upvote posts that I like.

[minimaxir]

On the other hand, it's a heuristic that does catch threads that become trainwrecks (recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17351353)

Anecdotally, it has been a safe heuristic. (IIRC it also incorporates comment depth, and the Ruby thread has a lot of deep comments)

[foepys]

That's being done to remove posts where flame wars are ongoing.