[newaccount74]

The popularity ranking suffers from a few problems.

One problem is that the 1% most popular comments get dozens/hundreds of replies, and no-one responds or even looks at the bottom 90% of comments.

The most popular posts and comments are usually very strong, divisive statements. If you don't have a strong opinion, noone will upvote you, and it will seem that everyone is either strongly for or against something.

Then there's the problem that time is a strong factor in the rankings, which means that there is rarely any long-term followup.

In old forums, there used to be threads that went on for years. Long term follow-up is close to non-existant on HN and Reddit.