If two commenters want to say the same thing, the first arrival will post it, and the second will upvote it (and maybe reply with additional information). So it

If two commenters want to say the same thing, the first arrival will post it, and the second will upvote it (and maybe reply with additional information). So it's not surprising that top comments are weighted towards early arrivals. The question needs to be are there later comments that are objectively better that don't end up sorted higher when sorting by "best". The "best" sort, by the way, does not use time as a factor, but rather generates a confidence score. Newer comments have less votes and thus less confidence (which ends up giving them a slight boost).