zlacker

You'll probably find with some digging that the "prevailing" attitude depends on time of day, changes completely from similar submissions from one day to the next, and might start out one way in a story only to wildly shift after a certain amount of time or comments.

This is likely for any of the following (non-exhaustive) reasons:

-Different prevailing opinions of people in different parts of the country/world combines with common participation times.

-How likely the title is to attract a specific ideology (or both).

-How long or dense the article is combined with when it hits the front page, as it may get passed around some subgroups informally prior to that point.

-The lag time between early comments and quick agreements and the group of comments that come later in response to those comments with deeper thinking of the topic and/or substantive facts or anecdotes that crystalize opinions on the subject.

Just think, how many times have you read comments about how "all the comments here seem negative, but..." only to count only 3-4 negative comments out of almost a hundred by the time you're reading them? That's because the nature of the discussion changed over time or as people decided it was worth posting that positive comment they hadn't thought worthwhile. It's fairly common.