Examples: The Hacker News Effect hitting websites. These are sites that can't handle 50 or so connections at once. That's not many, so of course it crashes.
Another example: I see this: 11. Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo (bloomberg.com) 1346 points by QUFB 10 hours ago | hide | 1703 comments
Getting over a thousand clicks! That's a lot here, but there are millions out there. Plus, 1700 comments is considered so out of control you have to lock it down so new commenters can't contribute?
I can see taking action with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands but we're really not talking about many people here.
Maybe try to scale the experience in the event this website grows? Numerically I mean.