That will be a poor flame detection scheme if HN gets too many readers like me. I use up-voting as a way to mark articles/threads that I have NOT yet read but want to come back to. The HN interface actually implicitly suggests this use for up-voting, by naming the list of articles you have up voted your "saved stories" instead of "up-voted stories".
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When the ratio of comments to article-upvotes reaches a certain point, threads are punished as 'flamewars'.
That will be a poor flame detection scheme if HN gets too many readers like me. I use up-voting as a way to mark articles/threads that I have NOT yet read but want to come back to. The HN interface actually implicitly suggests this use for up-voting, by naming the list of articles you have up voted your "saved stories" instead of "up-voted stories".
That sounds like a very good reason to move those threads below the fold.
But in this case it would be nice to have transparency. DropBox is arguably the top Y Combinator success story.
Or else people will have suspicions it was flagged by moderators for other reasons. Disclosure and all that.