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