If that norm is replaced by up/downvoting such comments as I advocate, you're right that the user doesn't suddenly become aware of what the problem/benefit is. But they weren't aware of that information before implementing that norm-replacement, either.
If all your comments are downvoted because someone deemed that 20% of them are damaging, it's much more difficult to deduce why that happened than if voting happens per comment.
if our goal is to maximize the amount of information people get about what's wrong (or right) with their comments [...] karma is a deeply flawed mechanism for achieving that goal
If you take into account how lazy people are explaining themselves, it might still be a pretty good mechanism for that purpose, certainly better than nothing.
If all your comments are downvoted because someone deemed that 20% of them are damaging, it's much more difficult to deduce why that happened than if voting happens per comment.
Yes, that's true.
If you take into account how lazy people are explaining themselves, it might still be a pretty good mechanism for that purpose, certainly better than nothing.
I certainly agree that karma is better than nothing, and I suppose it's possible that it represents an optimal means for getting information from people too lazy to provide information by other means.
I'm just tired of the signal pollution, and would like to be able to use karma to honestly appraise the worth of my articles and posts, without seeing 80% of my downvotes come in chunks that correspond precisely to how many posts I've made since the last massive downvote spree.
EDIT to add data points:
Spurious downvoting stopped soon after I named a particular individual (not ALL downvoting stopped, but the downvotes I got all seemed on-the-level.)
One block of potentially spurious downvoting occurred approximately one week ago, but then karma patterns returned to expected levels. I consider this block dubious, because it reasonably matches what I'd expect to see if someone noticed several of my posts together and disagreed with all of them, and did not match the usual pattern of starting with the earliest or latest post that I had made and downvoting everything (it downvoted all posts in a few threads, but not in other threads), so I'm just adding for completeness.
Spurious, indiscriminate downvoting started up again approximately half an hour ago on Sunday (12/1/2013), around noon MDT.
Edit: And now on Tuesday, 12/3/2013, at 10 AM, I'm watching my karma go down again... about 30 points so far.
Edit: And now on Saturday, 12/14/2013, at 2 PM, I'm watching my karma go down again... about 15 points so far, at a rate of about 1-2 points per second.