I actually expect that posts may become more extremely negative than they used to. At some point, you become sorry for a person with a highly negative comment; or at least I do. Sometimes I upvote comments that are negative because I think that the downvotes are unreasonable. Now there's no way for others to provide a check on the immoral downvoting behavior of others.
It seems that negative-scored comments still start to gray out, so you'll be able to upvote something you think has been unjustly penalized.
What you won't be able to do is aim things toward a desired positive score, such as downvoting a one-liner joke with 100+ points that you wouldn't downvote if it were at 20 points or less.
My guess would be: More groupthink, less bandwagon.
That is, comments that (intentionally or not) pander to the audience will get more upvotes, but good comments that happen to get several early upvotes won't get the same pile-on effect. That's just a WAG, though.
One thing I do notice: I'm already much less frustrated at comments I'm reading here. If somebody says something I disagree with, I can't see if half the site has voted them up, to me it's just a typical comment that I can either ignore or respond to.
Similarly, now dcurtis and I are arguing upthread, and I'm not anxiously wondering if he's been voted up more than me. We're just in a normal argument where neither of us will be proved by the community to be "more" right than the other. That's good.
