What determines which HN comments get upvoted?

If you make a "great" comment but the comment thread isn't popular, no/few upvotes

If you make a "great" comment in a really popular thread but it's buried down the comment tree where others are less likely to see it, no/few upvotes

Let's define by "great" comment we mean one that readers of that comment upvote at a high rate.

You'll likely get more votes by making a pretty good comment relatively early in a popular comment thread, at a time of the day when many people are reading HN, rather than an absolutely fantastic comment in some thread that hardly any one reads.

There's path dependence -- if there's two equally "great" comments contributed to a thread, and one is made 30 minutes earlier, it's likely that the earlier one accrues a bunch of votes and sub-threads, secures the best real estate at the top of the thread, and ends up with many more votes than the other one.

These may make it harder to identify if the content or topic is having much impact on the accrued votes.

Could perhaps normalise for that by adding metrics for the number of votes that the submission got, or the total number of votes of all comments in the thread, then see if that can explain some of the variation. Measuring the duration between when the comment thread opened and when the comment was posted could be interesting too.

i hope after enough corrections for topic popularity, time of day, how fast you commented, it becomes clear that your best topic is fire truck efficiency, and we can look forward to frequent comments about fire truck efficiency going forward