I really doubt there is any conscious decision by reddit to do this. For years there was a major bug in their ranking algorithm that hid posts with negative sco

I really doubt there is any conscious decision by reddit to do this. For years there was a major bug in their ranking algorithm that hid posts with negative scores. People invented reasons why this was intentional and why reddit might want to do that. But eventually they fixed the bug and admitted it wasn't intentional. The current comment sorting algorithm was just copied off the internet from some popular HN post. I don't think there was that much thought put into it. Showing a few new comments closer to the top is not going to hurt anyone. I think if anything the massive improvement in comment quality would make users more loyal to the site. At the moment you can only see the good comments posted by the first 20 people or so, imagine if it was the best comments out of 1,000? There are vastly more voters than commenters. If only one out of 5 people sees a new comment and votes on it, that would be more than enough to improve the comment quality 3 fold.