The opposite, actually - I remember reading that HN downranks posts that have a low favorability:engagement ratio - in its case, high comment count and comparatively low votes. The reasoning being that flamebait topics inspire a disproportionate number of angry/low-substance/pile-on comments and retort-chains compared to normal topics, without garnering a corresponding increase in top-level votes.

It's imperfect, but afaik most social media does the opposite (all "engagement" is good engagement), and I imagine, say, Twitter would be much nicer if it tuned its algo to not propagate posts with an unusually high view/retweet count relative to likes.

That's interesting, it seems like it would accidentally penalize a lot of "good" posts too, like people asking questions to better understand a topic/perspective

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