One of the bigger problems with reddit is that the anchoring effect makes any heavily downvoted comment essentially useless, even if said comment isn't wrong.

This gets even worse than the simple bandwagoning that most reddit users are familiar with; Because a heavily downvoted comment primes people to see said comment as wrong in some way, if said comment has multiple ways to be interpreted, people will pick the interpretation that is "wrong". This is problematic because it results in additional downvotes, but also completely makes any discussion useless; It's not uncommon for clarification about which interpretation of the comment is the one intended, to be ineffective, a lot of have issues with recognizing that they misread something, and refuse to see the commenter from any angle other than their initial interpretation of their comment.

The overall result is that keeping downvoted comments around isn't worthwhile, the options are:

• The commenter is actually wrong, and rightfully downvoted; Their comment is only spreading misinformation and would be better off deleted.

• The commenter is correct, and wrongfully downvoted; The anchoring effect and lower position on the list of comments negate the positive influence of the comment, and usually makes comments that wrongly disagree seem "correct", again the original comment being better off deleted.