"It's clear (at least to me) that comment voting just promotes group-think."

Hmm...what's the benefit of comment voting? What's the signal carried by a high vote on a comment? I guess the intention is "this is worth reading/this is interesting"?

I wonder how the crowd would react to having agree/disagree/interesting/uninteresting buttons? Would that pull some of the 'noise' out into the agree/disagree axis, leaving better signal in the interesting/uninteresting?

If nothing else, it would give the software some traction on finding people who vote disagree+interesting which might help weighting/filtering.