It doesn’t matter if the most upvoted comment is pro or against subject in discussion. All that matters is bolstering a comment that is minimally compatible with participant’s thinking and making it win against the opposite argument (competing and most voted one).
So it seems that the most satisfactory comment (for most readers) doesn’t really matter at all. What matters, before anything else, is visibility of an opinion that somewhat aligns with one’s thinking, rather than writing or finding the most corresponding comment for that subject, fully compatible with reader’s perception.
I think it’s more that not every comment gets upvoted after there is quite a few.
Early comments get voted on by merit. Once there is a few comments that have sufficient upvotes and replies, they become their own ecosystem.
If I’m in the comments of a popular post, I might upvote the first few top level comments I see as all make a good point. The fifth might make the best point and deserve to be higher, but alas, it only gets one upvote. By the time I get to the sixth, it’s just saying the same thing differently, no upvote needed. Seventh is interesting, so upvote, but it’s getting boring now. I don’t read further comments.
Other people stop at comment 10. Others stop at 4. So the first few get magnified, the rest struggle for the same level of attention and eyeballs. But it’s not a competition. So if the discussion is good, who cares. The 10th discussion might be the best because all the people with short attention spans, like me, aren’t there.
That’s the main issue with this system.
On Reddit you occasionally came across a post that was set up in election mode. The idea is that if you’re Youtuber or a podcast host, and you’re interested in having Q&A, but there are way too many questions, this way you can filter out all the boring questions and focus on the inserting ones. People can send a top level comment with a question, and they get to see all the other proposed questions in a random order. Then you can upvote and downvote as much as you like. Since the comments are in random order, there’s no top comment bias. However, there is still a time related bias. The first few people don’t have many comments to choose from whereas the latecomers have thousands of comments to vote.
Yeah, the issue is that early upvotes compound into more upvotes via visibility. You could have the best comment in the thread, but if it’s 10 days after the post was made and nobody else sees it, it won’t get any votes.
Well yeah, that’s just kind of the nature of conversations. That’s why a witty retort made an hour later just doesn’t have the oomph as a less funny one made in the moment.
In order to facilitate conversation, comments need to function like conversations, and those things just aren’t set in stone.
What it really comes down to is, when you comment, are you here to talk to people, to listen to them, or to get votes?
so keeping tabs on posts by quickly downvoting/upvoting (in)convenient subjects, as well as slightly steering them away from what’s really being discussed, might be a pretty handy tactic for manipulating course of conversation, and also making them look like not sufficiently valuable or important to be worth one’s time?
I never really did this on the bad place but if you browse new and fire off something snarky or heartfelt first it often becomes the top comment in my experience
Honestly, browsing by new is one of the fastest ways to become a recognizable power user. I actually did it for a while back on the bad place. After a while, you’re able to pretty quickly determine if a post is going to take off. Then you just drop a quick witty comment, and it’ll have thousands of upvotes and dozens of replies in a few hours.
I think a good rule of thumb would be to only upvote a comment if you think it’s not only good, but that it should be higher in the thread than it currently is. Then the comments already at the top wouldn’t end up so overweighted.