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.
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.