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.

Thankfully Lemmy somewhat negates this with their ranking algorithm. "Hot" is the default for comments and "active" is the default for posts, which according to the Lemmy docs, both "Counterbalance the snowballing effect of votes over time with a logarithmic scale."

Basically, if a newer comments gets some upvotes, but still has fewer upvotes than older comments, that new comment will still be shown near the top at first. Then after some time passes, the algorithm slowly shifts to sorting more by "raw" number of votes instead of taking time into account.

If it bothers you, why not sort by New and ignore votes?

You’re not going to avoid herd mentality when socializing within a social species. That’s just how we work. So if it bothers you, curate your experience to how you want it.

Hivemind-that-must-not-be-named users: (insert unfunny meme repeated 1000 times) Gets 69420 upvotes “eDiT: tHx 4 dA gOlD kInD sTrAnGeR!!1” “eDiT2: oMgG pLaTiNuM?! I nEvEr eXpEcTeD tHiS 2 bLoW uP!!!11!”

Another user on there: (actually helpful response) gets 2 upvotes

What I like about Lemmy at the moment is that it's not completely saturated with those people vying for Top Comment for sweet epic Reddit karma.

*I'm back from months later to say GODDAMIT I WAS WRONG

I think any sort of social aggregator will always have this as a challenge it wrestles with.

In my opinion, the onus of applying critical thinking when reading comments/sources lies with the reader.

When a very large upvoted comment takes places, I personally comb through some of the replies to see if anyone has sources/background that might be contradictory (and then I’ll review myself for my own opinion). It’s extra effort but I only apply this things I’m “vested” in.

This is why brigading is a problem.

There was a lot of it in the lemmy.world defederating from whatever they defederated from the other day thread.

Great, now I've up voted yours!

Unfortunately this is always the case with platforms that have voting in them. As soon as you get enough traction your comment/post will always be among the top (I would know, I had like 200k+ comment karma on Reddit). It's way better than the alternative though, having no votes at all would encourage spam and low effort posting and make browsing kind of miserable.

Some people long for the old days of forums where nothing was sorted and everyone had a fair chance at saying what they wanted but it always devolves into low effort posting, spam, and people fighting with trolls. 4chan is evidence of that.

Herd mentality is disappointing in general and usually slows progress in society.