Similar behavior appears to happen with quality of comments. Initial comments on a story are often insubstantial, knee-jerk low-quality comments. With time, thi

Similar behavior appears to happen with quality of comments. Initial comments on a story are often insubstantial, knee-jerk low-quality comments. With time, things generally get better. From what I gather (but I don't have any comments at hand), the mods do pay attention to voting behavior, both to detect up-voting rings and to penalize those abusing downvotes. Their usual recommendation, when coming across a comment you think is unfairly downvoted, is to silently apply a corrective upvote.