Is it? Sounds to me like they run the same experiment many times and keep the "best" results. Which is cheating, or if the same thing is done in biomedical research: research fraud.
Back in the slashdot days I would experiment on changing conversations. This was due to the way SD would rank and show its posts. Anything below a 3 would not change anything. But if you could get in early AND get a +5 on your post you could drive exactly what the conversation was about. Especially if you were engaged a bit and were willing to add a few more posts onto other posts.
Basically get in early and get a high rank and you are usually going to 'win'. Now it does not work all the time. But it had a very high success rate. I probably should have studied it a bit more. My theory is any stack ranking algorithm is susceptible to it. I also suspect it works decently well due to the way people will create puppet accounts to up rank things on different platforms. But you know, need numbers to back that up...
It's intrinsic to any karma system that has a global karma rating, that is, the message has a concrete "karma" value that is the same for all users.
drcongo recently referenced something I sort of wish I had time to build: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43843116 And/or could just go somewhere to use, which is a system where an upvote doesn't mean "everybody needs to see this more" but instead means "I want to see more of this user's comments", and downvotes mean the corresponding opposite. It's more computationally difficult but would create an interestingly different community, especially as further elaborations were built on that. One of the differences would be to mitigate the first-mover advantage in conversations. Instead of it winning you more karma if it appeals to the general public of the relevant site, what it would instead do is expose you to more people. That would produce more upvotes and downvotes in general but wouldn't necessarily impact visibility in the same way.
That is an interesting idea. But I suspect it really would still create a moderate first mover advantage in small communities. Early first mover advantage I suspect is decent in any up/down point based system ranking. Would have to run simulations on it. I also suspect what is being described is similar to the way YT works. For example I know they random feed me things. If I click on it and watch the whole vid. Suddenly I get a lot more suggestions from that channel or cohorts to it. But I cant prove that as they are terribly inscrutable on describing what it does (for good reason!).
Don't forget page positioning. There's little point from a points perspective to replying to messages further down, or even to reply to the OP - but a reply to the top comment will give you lots of attention.
