What makes you so confident it's not the algorithm?
I'm pretty sure it's been well established that a high comment-to-upvote ratio causes the HN ranking algorithm to penalize a story.
I'm pretty sure it's been well established that a high comment-to-upvote ratio causes the HN ranking algorithm to penalize a story.
I heard the same as you, but I wonder if it has more to do with how many downvotes/flags are being handed out in the comments compared to how many votes the story is getting, rather than the absolute number of comments.