Comment count heuristic removed from feed algo

The site's team removed a feed ranking rule that had boosted stories with more comments, after it produced a weird ranking and degraded feed quality. Tim Daubenschütz wrote that the rule, introduced the previous day, counted each comment as half an upvote, but it did not decay older comments the way upvotes decayed, so comments kept their weight over time. The post says comments are expected to influence rankings again in the future, and that product updates will now be posted on the site rather than in the Telegram channel.