Comment by embedding-shape
6 hours ago
I mean, no, karma depends entirely on the contents of your comment :P I've have comments go from 0 to -4 to 50 to 10 over the course of one day, probably I'd say the flunctionations depends more on how controversial ("hot take") your comment is, but if it's generally good, it tends to be upvoted while more emotional/nonsense appeals tend to be downvoted. Pretty much as expected :)
Your comment is never going to get 75 votes on it if it only gets in front of 25 eyes, regardless of how good, bad, offensive, or insightful it is.
Especially on political threads you'll see the most milquetoast takes imaginable basically locked at the top of the page because they were commented 2 minutes after the post was made, and all the fighting happens underneath.
Being late to a post though does you no favors. People have moved on. So it's both.
Hot takes? Aside: an example of a "third rail" post (where I seem to get the most downvotes) appears to be when I disparage UBI. I used to get hated for disparaging self-driving cars too but people beat me up less about that these days.