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.
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.
Thankfully Lemmy somewhat negates this with their ranking algorithm. “Hot” is the default for comments and “active” is the default for posts, which according to the Lemmy docs, both “Counterbalance the snowballing effect of votes over time with a logarithmic scale.”
Basically, if a newer comments gets some upvotes, but still has fewer upvotes than older comments, that new comment will still be shown near the top at first. Then after some time passes, the algorithm slowly shifts to sorting more by “raw” number of votes instead of taking time into account.
What I like about Lemmy at the moment is that it’s not completely saturated with those people vying for Top Comment for sweet epic Reddit karma.
*I’m back from months later to say GODDAMIT I WAS WRONG
If it bothers you, why not sort by New and ignore votes?
You’re not going to avoid herd mentality when socializing within a social species. That’s just how we work. So if it bothers you, curate your experience to how you want it.
I think any sort of social aggregator will always have this as a challenge it wrestles with.
In my opinion, the onus of applying critical thinking when reading comments/sources lies with the reader.
When a very large upvoted comment takes places, I personally comb through some of the replies to see if anyone has sources/background that might be contradictory (and then I’ll review myself for my own opinion). It’s extra effort but I only apply this things I’m “vested” in.
This is why brigading is a problem.
There was a lot of it in the lemmy.world defederating from whatever they defederated from the other day thread.
Great, now I’ve up voted yours!
