I think part of the problem is that everyone that comments then upvotes. Same as askreddit, for instance. Plus I wouldn't be surprised if these are manually pushed out of the top, there's like one a week and the mods must be getting sick of it
It seems to me that they may be trying too hard to intuit the quality of a thread based on behaviors which don't explicitly indicate it. I think that the only behaviors that should push a thread down are downvotes and flags, not upvoting and/or commenting in the wrong order, or only doing one but not the other.
OTOH, I have definitely noticed that stories with a high upvote/comment ratio seem to have better quality. In the absence of story downvotes, it makes a certain amount of sense to regard a comment without an upvote as a weak signal that the story is low quality. Penalizing stories with lots of comments relative to votes makes sense to me. (I don't know if that's what actually happens, just saying it wouldn't surprise me)
