Comment by dang

Can you link to some specific examples of low-quality discussions?

As with any Major Ongoing Topic on HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), the goal is to reserve frontpage space for the higher-quality stories and try to downweight the follow-ups and low-quality ones. We can't do this perfectly, of course, but we try.