It's probably just my age, as I started out online when most discussion forums lacked explicit voting mechanisms. Before social media came along, and "gamified" human conversation. Maybe it helps police trolls, but at the cost of encouraging group-think and excessive meme-referencing, and just making a lot of people more neurotic and insecure in general. Overall, I think that online discussion is worse than it was 15 years ago, due to the psychological effects of all the imaginary Internet points.

But anyhoo, at the time I saw this (45 minutes after my original comment), my comment had 25 votes and was the top-most thing on this page. More often than not, if you wait an hour, the crowd straightens out the impact of any early outliers.