Here's a set of friendly follow-up questions to your question about vote counts:
1) When we see that pg opened a thread 77 days ago titled "Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696
and wrote there, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted,"
wouldn't that mean that a reduction in total votes was exactly what was expected?
Later, when pg looked back on the experiment of hiding comment karma scores while posting a user poll
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605
and he wrote, "There was a nasty kind of argument that used to happen, where people would literally try to score points off one another, and users voting on the thread became like a mob egging on two people fighting. I prefer HN without comment scores, because those fights really disturbed me, and they've practically gone away since I hid comment scores," was there any concern about total vote count?
On my part, to answer your question by anecdote, I still vote a lot, especially upvoting comments that are thoughtful and informative, and at least some of my comments get upvoted a lot by other users, especially those that are the most thoughtful and informative from my keyboard. These days, as I reported in the last thread opened by pg, I can usually tell by comment placement in threads which comments are thought to be helpful comments by the community, even without numerical scores. I definitely have voted as much as or even more than ever, to let users who post good comments know that they are helping the community. I've also reviewed the Hacker News online documentation about what to upvote and what to downvote since pg posted his last poll. The Hacker News welcome message
http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
gives an overview of the community goals here, summarizing the site guidelines.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The Hacker News FAQ
http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
gives some additional details about how Hacker News is administered. All are good guides about how to comment, and how to vote (up or down) on other participants' comments.