I don't know how reddit works exactly, but I notice that they generally have a few "hidden" comments in the tree.

I assume this is to prevent this phenomenon. If your comment is significantly worse than the rest of an active thread, it shouldn't be prominently displayed.

Well, jed has removed it, but his original comment here implied that links|comments are ordered solely on the score via voting... While that is a larger driver in the "topics" that get posted, it certainly is NOT the algorithm used for determining comment ordering.

I noted more in my later comment responding to your (in my opinion) naive cheapshot on reddit, but the "best" algorithm, that is the default, does not simply rank by the number of votes. And even then, the nature of subreddits and people opting to subscribe to that which they're interested in goes a long way to putting their "upvotes" or "downvotes" into the context of the users in that subreddit.

I'd love another shot at this conversation. If you grant that there are other factors at play for determining comment ordering, and you still insist that a site is "broken" because it utilizes voting... what is the alternative? Or are you suggesting that all sites are in some fashion "broken" and that it's a common problem with any site powered by user content?

Not quite. That filters out the bad ones, but the underlying problem still remains: people reply to highly-ranked comments with something only tangentially related, or not related at all, in order to put it in front of a wider audience.

People then upvote it even though it isn't related because it might be insightful.