Thank you for the analysis. Would it help if you saw who, in particular, downvoted/upvoted each of your comments? There is this feature "make my votes public", but it's virtually unusable in its current implementation (as it's scoped by voters, not by articles that are being voted for), and it doesn't seem to apply to comments at all. If the list of people who publicly voted about your comments (not everyone else's) is directly visible next to the comments, I expect that to be useful to the newcommers, and it won't clutter the interface overly much.