HN downweights threads that receive more comments than upvotes. It's a quite useful heuristic to avoid flame wars, in my opinion.
E.g. could a controversial thread (plenty of upvotes, plenty of downvotes) get pushed off the front page because it has a low upvote:comment ratio?
I get that YC probably don't want to deal with controversy, but, well this is a community, of sorts...
Whenever I see some article posted, that is likely to generate a storm of bickering (many platforms elicit this; not just politics), I'm usually happy to see it take a nosedive.
I had something that I submitted, fairly recently, get plonked. It was actually fairly sensible and relevant, but one of the commenters posted something that was "sort of" a "dox," and I understood why it disappeared.
You can't downvote submissions, just flag them. As for comments, I'm not sure how the sorting works there (but it seems like net upvotes, with comments younger than an hour being pushed to the top).
these two are the same since you can't downvote submissions.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
As a suggested experiment, randomly select 25 stories with comments>votes, and 25 stories with votes>comments. Go through the comments on those 50 stories and score them for flamewarishness. It's probably a half day's work. 50 stories * 3 minutes each for scoring, plus some time for the random sampling and stats.
You could present the data as a plot of your subjective flamewar score vs. log(votes/comments)