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.
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.
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?