It’s not that they downrank as much as comments give less and less to a story’s importance relative to new stories. Witness that the Altman/openai drama would not die and was glued to the top of HN for a weekend.

At this point given the dearth of comments, it feels like any comment should almost reset the decay function to that of a new story.with the current scoring if there was a comment on something on off the front page you’d never know it. But if a story popped back to the top with a comment on it it might be of value to read and spur on more participation