Comment by ranger207

I think it's just that the community is so big now. If 1% of 100 regular posters are likely to get into flamewars over crypto, then that may result in a dozen comments or so. If 1% of 10,000 regular posters are flamewarriors, well...

An interesting heuristic I've seen play out a few times now across different communities (and that HN is starting to suffer from now on more contentious topics) is that too many comments on a post means that it's low quality. A handful of comments on an old post means there's not a lot to say about a topic; too many comments means that there's not a lot to change your mind about