It's not just "lots of comments" though. It's more comments than upvotes. You may disagree, and it may not be a perfect metric, but in reality I think it's works very well. 90+% of the time when I look at a post with tons of comments and a relatively small number of upvotes, it's flamewar central.

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user_7832 a day ago | parent [-]

True, but there's that 10% posts where there's (eg) a good cancer breakthrough, and it's two guys going back and forth on the methodology adding a lot of comments. Not always, but not never either.

I really wish there was a way to "mark" such posts as "high quality, ignore comment to vote ratio" just like how you can vouch a comment. Enough such marks and it gets auto turned off the flamewar parameter.

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krapp a day ago | parent [-]

Back-and-forth conversation isn't high quality by definition, it's just the baseline for not being bad enough to downvote. I think Hacker News wants the baseline to be some degree of exceptional.

	▲	fragmede a day ago \| parent [-]
		Or just not boring. The guidelines state, among other things: > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Reading yet another thread where commenters go back and forth on, eg how Elon Musk sucks/is awesome doesn't make for interesting reading because it's the same conversation that's been had before, and neither side is getting convinced by the other side's argument.