I think there's a secondary effect going on in social media comments (including this site). The mostly anonymous nature of things means that people have no ability to understand who they're talking to or their qualifications to speak on a subject. So they take cues from language itself. When things are posted without exuding confidence, people assume ineptitude or uncertainty and rarely regard it as meaningful. By contrast things posted confidently instill trust and confidence and thus are treated as more meaningful.

You can trial this pretty easily by just creating multiple accounts and consciously changing the tone of the comments you make. It's pretty amusing! Online comment voting systems are extremely easy to game because of basic recurring phenomena like this, that you'll find many people come to exploit whether consciously or not. And thanks to those little arrows by our names, those comments that game the system end up near the top.

And finally you also have to keep in mind the You and I that actually chat instead of lurk are outliers, a surprisingly small percent of all people on the site. So you get twisted and likely counter-productive conversational cues driving conversations between a likely biased sample of (not necessarily positive) outliers. And finally now add in the countless biased interests (corporate and political in particular) with presences working to steer perception to their benefit. Nonetheless, I still find it entertaining watching how all the parts play together.