But there are some outliers that are getting voted much higher than they honestly deserve. I'm talking 50-70 range for something that would have been 8-10 before.
I think people might be seeing comments that contribute to the conversation in some useful way and are now upvoting them when they would have let them cap out at a medium score, if they could see the score.
They have no way to know the comment is already considerably over-upvoted.
I mean, thanks for the karma and all, but I don't know that it's really helping.
I don't see it addressing the quantity of highly voted comments vs quantity of lower voted comments.
Good point though. It does definitely question my assertion that the herd mentality has negatively affected the value of upvotes. But I don't believe it disproves it.
If this is a common change in other's voting patterns, you might see a shrinking of mid ranked comments, since there are less votes to go around.
If this is the case, I would say that the herd metality has been removed. I never stopped voting on comments that I thought were really good, just on the ones that I was on the fence about, and pushed over by their rank.
The fact that the high comments have seen a bump? Maybe people are reading more in depth, which could get them a few extra up votes? It's a possiblity.
We won't know for sure until we see some actual stats about whats going on. I don't think either side could prove the other wrong at this point.