i'm pretty sure that people who vote on reddit can have opinion, and they intersect in some way with people who comment.

there might be more negative comments, but that's actually a natural phenomenon -- comments of agreement looking like "+1" are generally avoided, but comments of disagreement are typically more meaningful becauae comment author can describe _how_ he disagrees. also, you see, comments like "author is great!" are generally considered asslicking, and hence are inpopular.

so, you cannot realiably judge opinion of mass from comments.

but you can do this from vote number.