I think both comments and posts should be evaluated (separately), but i agree that voting patterns are very different.

Regarding how long it'd take, that depends to strength of the effect... what i think is the strongest effect, is that anything negative gets read much more critically - where a + voted post's assertions will get read and seen in positive light if at all plausible, negative-voted assertions are likely to be immediately challenged (do they compel me to believe style) - it should be general reflex, that's just being a good Bayesian reasoner, but it leads to circular reasoning problems when everyone's reasoning this way together.

If I were to have a theory that you guys tend to apply bayesian reasoning in practice when reading posts, the vote spiral would follow as a testable hypothesis. It's just how that stuff works in networks. Bayesian reasoning requires tracking where the data is originating from.

Yea, that'll take a while. We'll see about testing. The proposed effect can be strong if each next comment is affected by the previous, so that the initial disturbance does not 'dissolve' in a larger number. But i kind of doubt. I don't really care whole ton for votes, i generally take them as a measure of clarity of the point, but any priming most definitely would result in their lower usefulness as a gauge of clarity. Also theres apparently voting via recent comments thread; tbh i nearly forgot you can read comments expanded, as it does seem not to be very interesting due to majority of comments being brief and meaningless outside context.

Bash out a script to watch LW and vote on things as they appear, leave it to generate data as long as one likes, then hey presto. Tiny bit tempted to do it myself, approval or not.

I'm becoming increasingly tempted to submit automation detection scripts to the lesswrong codebase.