Comment by derefr

I might bet that upvotes to middlebrow dismissal would be highly correlated with downvotes to the article itself, if we had downvotes to articles. In fact, I believe that these comments rise to the top because people are downvoting the article vicariously, by upvoting a rebuttal, however vacuous. In order to confirm this hypothesis, though, you'd have to collect data by implementing a downvote button on articles -- though it would not necessarily have to do anything in article-ranking terms ;)

(That might introduce a confounding factor, though--namely that by alleviating people's urge to downvote the article by giving them a [nonfunctional] button to do just that, people might stop upvoting the dismissive comments. Hmm....)