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The average number of comments per submission doesn't seem to have changed much.

In any case, the number of comments on a link doesn't seem very highly correlated with its quality: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=106893

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Quality is something hard to measure, we're in a community, so I think that the quality of a thread is given by the number of points it has, not by the number of comments.

The number of comments just mean that people have something to say about an specific thread.

I disagree with your metric for measuring quality -- all one has to do is look at reddit or digg to see that it fails. Of course, quality is in the eye of the beholder. I'm sure there are plenty of things who think that reddit or digg are the highest quality news sites out there.

Hmm... That's an interesting question. How do we actually measure quality?

I agree with you, for me the number of points a thread has is just a measure of how many people in our community think it's an interesting topic. About the quality of the thread, well, as you said, quality is in the eye of the beholder, for example, the thread that pg is showing as an example, (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=106893) is a funny and interesting one for me.

How we actually measure quality?... Hmmm, that would make a great startup right?

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