right but feel like comment count is a poor proxy for flamewar in an age where cheap intelligence to semantically classify discussions is available, so that, as affected me in the past, an author of a post simply enthusiastically engaging with every reply is not punished.
maybe to put it in a way where your values are aligned, i'm a curious person, and i learn a lot from the discussions that happen right on HN rather that only going to the source.. indiscriminate comment count damping takes away/lowers visibility of the most interesting comments that would provoke my curiosity.
one could instead do any sort of basic classifier system ranging from bag of words to running a ModernBERT to rate flamewarness and differentially apply the downrank based on "flamewar score" rather than "really poor proxy to flamewar score"
Do you have a different approach in mind that we could do instead?
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...