[throwitaway1123]

HN's flamewar detector penalizes stories with a high comment to upvote ratio, and they also penalize flagged stories too of course. It's one of the reasons why I browse /active quite a bit instead of just the front page.

[EarthLaunch]

Thanks for the tips, I didn't know about /active!

[throwitaway1123]

Glad I could help. There's a whole repo full of undocumented HN features: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented