The confusion over this issue springs from the overloading of voting as both "promote/demote" (community appropriateness) and "agree/disagree" (personal opinion).
It's easy to understand why a 'demote' should be withheld once the community goal of deemphasizing a inappropriate comment has been reached.
It's harder to understand why someone should withhold their personal opinion, simply because they were later to vote. To the extent the net score is an opinion poll, more votes are more representative, no matter how late they arrive.
These two sometimes-conflicting senses could be split into two axes of community feedback, one promote(up)/demote(down), the other agree/disagree. Agree/disagree would be shown as a different score, or tiny sparkline-like bars reflecting not just the net value but the separate agree/disagrees totals. Then people would have an outlet for 'piling on' with personal opinions without unwanted karmic or order-of-display impact.
This might also serve to highlight some interesting classes of comments: those respected (upvoted) but generally disagreed-with, or those with high simultaneous levels of both agreement or disagreement. (Right now there's no way to tell if a comment scored 1 has no votes, or 20 upvotes and 20 downvotes.)
> It's harder to understand why someone should withhold their personal opinion, simply because they were later to vote.
You can think of it as a strange and illogical tradition of this particular community if that helps. However, I think there's a good reason for it: "beating up" on unpopular comments, or even wrong ones, is "unneighborly". In a conversation amongst a group of people, if someone says something wrong, and one person corrects them, it would look pretty weird if all the others took turns saying "yeah, I think you're wrong too".
Personally, what I would love to see is this: I see a comment that is from someone, say a regular who I respect, that is flat out factually incorrect. It's already at -1, where I think it should stay, and someone has already responded with a comment citing correct information. It would be ideal to have a "hold at -1" button that adds my downvote if anyone else happens to vote the comment up. But it really doesn't matter all that much. The most important thing is the community spirit of the thing.
You can think of it as a strange and illogical tradition of this particular community if that helps.
Oh, I understand it.
But I suspect it's hopeless, long term, to try to convey that subtle idea as usership grows. The mod-up/mod-down is an 'attractive nuisance' that will always attract agree/disagree piling-on, because you can't untrain people of their expectations of what 'voting'/'polling' means, and it's just so darn easy, when you've only got one bit worth of reaction to a comment, to use a click rather than a reply to express yourself. (It'd even be better for the site, if that one click didn't trigger karma resentments and feelings of censorship.)
A river finds the sea; simple agree/disagree sentiment is flowing into mod-up/mod-down because that's the easiest path for its expression.
It's harder to understand why someone should withhold their personal opinion, simply because they were later to vote.
That's the way things already work in the real world. One is less likely to complain about something when a lot of other people have already complained about it. It's considered "beating a dead horse."
But in a poll or election, there's no general taboo against expressing your redundant opinion. In fact, it's encouraged, to get a complete or representative sample.
And especially when a comment provokes strong opinions, but is already well-expressed, a simple click-vote-with-tally is almost irresistant to people as an outlet. It's quick, it's easy, it doesn't bloat the thread with vertically-expensive 'my thoughts exactly' or 'I couldn't disagree more' one-line replies.
The one downside is that it also affects karma and display position, and thus is likely to generate resentments and competitions. That's what makes it a bit unseemly; 'beating a dead horse' or unneighborly 'piling-on'.
Hence the solution: give people a pure agree/disagree vote separate from mod-up/mod-down.
I know that's your intent, but each wave of new users is only going to pick that up slowly -- if ever.
And it's not just the word 'vote' that's a problem. The UI/functionality doesn't completely support that intent: they're "comments" that can be erased when the next person votes the other way. They're reported like a poll -- a summary number. But downvotes sting more than respectful disagreement, because they imply transgression.
The coarsening of discussion, the anguish over piling-on, the long threads about proper voting, the karmic games -- they're all worsened because the 1-bit message 'this comment is bad' and the 1-bit message 'I disagree' are forced into a single 1-bit channel.
(Forcing "this comment is good" and "I agree" in the same channel isn't problematic the same way, because neither sentiment conveys opprobrium and triggers defensiveness.)
