Interesting. This is OT, but before your comment, my little joke was at like +5 or +6 within an hour or so. After your comment was posted, people immediately began downvoting me. I've seen this quite a bit...people seem to agree with a comment until someone else disagrees, then the community sentiment shifts the other way.
It's the primary problem with group mentality and crowdsourcing. Sometimes it takes a second commenter to change somebody's opinion - not in this case, but if somebody sounds convincing, gets upvoted, then gets a powerful argument from somebody else, the votes start swaying.
That's probably a good thing, because it shows that people aren't just mindlessly upvoting. The follow-up comments are convincing people to think. The problem of course comes from the fact that because we can see the points a comment gets, we assume that we're being judged when really the points are effectively meaningless.
(If we're allowed to comment like fanboys, can we congratulate PG for breaking 40,000 karma?)
This brings up an interesting point: why are the vote counts even shown on HN? Why not just use them for ranking and ordering, but don't display them, at least by default?
I've tried to bring that up a lot - I honestly don't know what vote counts add to the conversation beyond bias on the part of the readers. That's the one thing that a site like Metafilter offers that Hacker News doesn't, and I feel like it's something that HN and Reddit and Digg before it all lack: the ability to speak your mind openly without any worries about karma and public downvoting.
I feel that there is a need for feedback after undertaking an action. If you click a button, and nothing happens, you'll quit clicking the button. We do want people to vote.
So...
How about hiding the points until after you vote. That way, you're not influenced, but you still get feedback that is necessary to keep you voting.
That's the other thing that's been proposed. I've always felt that doesn't seem like an elegant solution to me. The act of the button's disappearing once you've clicked is a response enough for me. It also serves as a visual cue of what you've read and what you haven't.
The question I'd ask you is what matters more, the discussion or the moderation? Shouldn't the attraction to the people commenting here be the quality of the conversation, rather than the ability to vote things up and down? The latter is important, but does it have to be seen?
I agree, it's a pretty elegant solution. However, I like seeing how many points a comment has, before I vote, for several reasons:
* I often don't vote
* to see how, exactly, the community feels about it
* to see if I should actually read it
* to get a feel for the story's exposure (more votes, more eyeballs)
This wouldn't be an issue if it weren't for the first point... I don't want to have to vote on each comment to reap the benefits of the other items on the list.
The second item on the list allows me to have the "blink" effect. By taking in the vote #'s of hundreds or thousands of comments, I just get a "feel" for what HN likes and dislikes. To me, that's it's important.
I think something in between would be a color-coded and/or normalized indicator of each comment's popularity. Kind of like how the grayed out text is more intense for more downvoted comments... upvoted comments could have some indicator of how popular they are.
If normalized, it would show how popular they are, but only relative to other comments with the same parent as them.
