I don't know understand why its going down? The downvotes should be displayed separately and should not affect the upvotes, unless the upvotes are getting deleted (by somebody or by the upvoters themselves)
Because either the Atlantic is moderating the comments or the COS employs a lot of sockpuppets (my guess on the latter.)
You can cause the same thing to happen to any comment by rapidly clicking the upvote button. This seems to cause the upvote count to drift upward, even though you would expect it to just oscillate between two values. I've just taken parkermoseyondown's comment from 0 to 40 upvotes.
Edit: This seems to be a UI issue. After reloading his comment is sitting at only 1 upvote.
A few minutes ago his comment had over 600 upvotes. Now it's teetering around 300.. it appears the moderators are also removing upvotes?
Now his comment seems to have gone...
Yup. CREEPY.
Hrm, I'll be fascinated to know whether there's a COS employee of the Atlantic or whether they give moderator accounts to their advertisers, HuffPo-style.
I think any forum with upvote/downvote needs to have this, so cool to watch.