Comment by friendly_chap

I generally agree, however, your comment would be more valuable if you would include verifiable information instead of anecdotes and personal opinion, and you would actually analyse the problem instead of throwing around vague criticism.

My take on the subject is:

This effect can be mostly attributed to the fact that a top comment means more exposure, and given that the upvotes outweight the downvotes on the response (which is true, since that's why it is at the top), by deductive reasoning we arrive to the obvious conclusion that more exposure will further cement the position of a given post.

Also we must not forget about the effect of peer pressure[1]

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_pressure

For those with a lack of humour, I include a smiley here: :-)