I just saw that Ask HN: What's your greatest epiphany? was banned from the Front Page to Page 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7545284, because it had double the number of comments than upvotes.
Afaik, this is used to remove flame wars from the front page, however might have had a false positive in this case:
Normally, flame wars have great depth of comments, as in the comments are nested to a great extend.
However, in the above Ask HN thread half of the comments aren´t nested, but simple answers to the question.
For that reason, not sure if this is done already, but I would suggest that flame wars are investigated based on the depth of nesting instead of total number of comments.
Afaik, this is used to remove flame wars from the front page, however might have had a false positive in this case:
Normally, flame wars have great depth of comments, as in the comments are nested to a great extend.
However, in the above Ask HN thread half of the comments aren´t nested, but simple answers to the question.
For that reason, not sure if this is done already, but I would suggest that flame wars are investigated based on the depth of nesting instead of total number of comments.