Human nature is going to give those comments more upvotes, which automatically moves them to "top comment" position, so at the risk of being facetious: yes, obviously?
I agree with you that topcommentness can subtly but immensely change a comment's meaning, through no fault of the commenter or even any individual upvoter.
It would make sense if your comments were weighted higher having a higher karma, but I think all of our comments start at the top to make sure that at least someone sees them and that they can get upvotes if they are insightful/interesting.
Right, and that's part of the problem -- the top comment usually has a lot of replies, and so the 2nd-top comment isn't seen as much. So even people who might agree with the 2nd-top comment a lot more than the top comment might not even see it, and not upvote it.
(And especially if you see the top comment, and disagree with it vehemently, you might dig through the replies to that comment and start posting rebuttals. You might get tired of the topic before you get down to the 2nd-top comment, and leave the submission or the site entirely.)
Being the top comment is self-reinforcing, even if other comments actually do reflect the majority opinion better. I don't think we can say that the top comment is the majority/prevailing opinion. That's just the opinion that, due to lucky/random circumstances, got the most initial views and upvotes by people who agree, which then feedback-looped itself into staying the top comment.
I'm not so sure about this. I routinely see comments that start like that with a lot of upvotes. It could be survival bias, but I have a feeling reverse psychology could be coming into play.
I'm kind of skeptical. The biggest problem as I see it is that a lot of the more interesting comments get voted to zero because 'controversy' or not 'mainstreamed thought,' while frequently a lot of the heavily upvoted comments are platitudes/acceptingly normative/self-reinforcing meh kind, while many of the more interesting ones are often in the middle. Now I may be wrong about this, but I don't think high karma is indicative of the quality comments so much as it is indicative of a comments' closeness to the communities normalized colloquially accepted wisdom, since the crowd is self-reinforcing.
I generally agree, however, your comment would be more valuable if you would include verifiable information instead of anecdotes and personal opinion, and you would actually analyse the problem instead of throwing around vague criticism.
My take on the subject is:
This effect can be mostly attributed to the fact that a top comment means more exposure, and given that the upvotes outweight the downvotes on the response (which is true, since that's why it is at the top), by deductive reasoning we arrive to the obvious conclusion that more exposure will further cement the position of a given post.
Also we must not forget about the effect of peer pressure[1]
BlackDeath3's argument was that a voting system is the means through which the best comments, as deemed by the majority of users, receive the most exposure. You misunderstood them and referred them to the current top comment, pointing out that it was quite substantial. Without realizing it though, you were demonstrating their point.
That theory makes sense, though it's unfortunate, IMHO. Personally, I'd prefer for comments to rank higher based on quality (irrespective of which way they lean) than hivemind inclinations. Seek well-roundedness and all that.
There is also a strong bias toward upvoting more visible content. Higher-voted comments appear first on the page, getting more exposure. For that reason I’ve made it a habit to read comments in bottom-to-top order, in order to artificially make my votes more fair.
not really, it results in people being forced to hijack the top comment if they want any chance of their post being seen. And upvoting mechanism typically make things worse as well
Can we make a generalisation of reddit when something is the top story on the whole site, and the majority of highly upvoted comments make the same point?
I've seen the phenomenon on Reddit where two identical comments will have completely polar votes. One might have -50 and the other 50.
Someone deduced that it was the time that the comment was created that mattered. If a large number of jokesters are on at one point then their up votes will create the critical mass to push the comment to the top and keep it there.
I also believe that once a post is at the top fewer people will downvote it, either because they are afraid to go against popular opinion or merely respect it and leave it as it is.
Given how often it is that the first vote on a good comment is a downvote, I can't help but wonder if there are people who deliberately downvote good comments so their comments rise higher.
I actually find issues with the "best" comment sorting, in some cases. I think it generally is the "best" sort, but in very popular posts it tends to break down.I often find comments with 5x or more upvotes buried down below the top few comments.
I think as comments get higher to the top, people start voting them down more, which might not be the cases for comments which are rising (theory: people reading further down in the comment section are possibly more thoughtful and more likely to upvote, while at the top the ADHD crowd might be more likely to knee jerk downvote?).
In any case, i've recently changed my default sort to "top" and feel it's an improvement.
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