it's about the comments / votes ratio.

To be more specific, it is a heuristic for detecting flamewars and/or controversial topics and it is quite good at that.

why exactly do we want to damp flamewars by comment count? as long as an individual comment fits the rules why do we punish comments in aggregate

Because it's a global optimization problem and HN gets less optimal* when there are flamewars on the frontpage.

Do you have a different approach in mind that we could do instead?

* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

right but feel like comment count is a poor proxy for flamewar in an age where cheap intelligence to semantically classify discussions is available, so that, as affected me in the past, an author of a post simply enthusiastically engaging with every reply is not punished.

maybe to put it in a way where your values are aligned, i'm a curious person, and i learn a lot from the discussions that happen right on HN rather that only going to the source.. indiscriminate comment count damping takes away/lowers visibility of the most interesting comments that would provoke my curiosity.

one could instead do any sort of basic classifier system ranging from bag of words to running a ModernBERT to rate flamewarness and differentially apply the downrank based on "flamewar score" rather than "really poor proxy to flamewar score"