As a suggested experiment, randomly select 25 stories with comments>votes, and 25 stories with votes>comments. Go through the comments on those 50 stories and score them for flamewarishness. It's probably a half day's work. 50 stories * 3 minutes each for scoring, plus some time for the random sampling and stats.
You could present the data as a plot of your subjective flamewar score vs. log(votes/comments)
As a suggested experiment, randomly select 25 stories with comments>votes, and 25 stories with votes>comments. Go through the comments on those 50 stories and score them for flamewarishness. It's probably a half day's work. 50 stories * 3 minutes each for scoring, plus some time for the random sampling and stats.
You could present the data as a plot of your subjective flamewar score vs. log(votes/comments)