I left points hanging. I didn't defend what I was saying. I just told a story. That's what you want?

Why hello there! We are called humans, have you met us before?

One factor is that it's a top-level comment to a popular post, and once a top-level comment outcompetes most others it's shown more prominently and read by more people.

Because votes come more from the location in the thread than from quality of the post - sheer numbers of people reading it swamp a better post made 400 spots downthread. Also, it puts down in decent fashion a thesis that's getting kicked around a lot and that is rather appealing.

The post where put down the theory this grew from only has 2 points.

I don't think your current post "deserves" as many upvotes as it got, but that other post is just bad. Badly written, badly argued, makes lots of unsupported random claims, like "Voldemort killed Narcissa".

Maybe the illusion of transparency doesn't let you see how much clearer this comment [EDIT: I mean the parent comment] is.

This isn't written any better than my other posts, which commonly stay under 3 points and go negative often enough.

Well, I thought it was!

I downvoted the previous post because it was a needlessly complicated, poorly justified plan. Crucially, there was little indication of why Voldemort would want to pretend to lose, when he was already winning the war. By contrast, your more recent post is a good analysis of the new insight into Voldemort's history and motivations provided by the latest chapter.

I liked the story you told, I found it interesting so I upvoted (but your post was like at 5 or 6 when I upvoted it, I wouldn't have upvoted it if it was already above 30, I tend to avoid upvoting posts which are already too high, unless they are really wonderful).

I didn't see the first one - I don't read all the comments, depends of my schedule. Maybe since you posted your new one earlier in the thread, when it wasn't too bloated, more people saw it ?