I've seen more than one vote count done in under 15 seconds. That indicates a facebook level of thinking.

@JourneymanGeek - comparing S.Xchange's answers to an extreme, says little about quality of answers. I could just as easily have a site that requires killing a chicken as a sacrifice and compare it to another w/o such. It seems obvious that such a comparison does little to support current sites' answer quality. A better comparison would be to another system that uses voting to get answers: Example: voting on political candidates and other gov+admin policies. It's considered bad to display votes before the vote is closed.

@Ramhound authoritatively says "None of them.", supporting the correlation between self-ascribed certainty and actual knowledge (in this case,) of voters' internal motivations. Perhaps now you see why I think hiding vote counts from voters would be a good thing. In this case, Ramhound has no doubt as to the reasons people voted a certain way and responded in kind. It wouldn't be atypical for someone in that position to claim that they really were "kidding".

If a question is a duplicate of a previous question, then I'm assuming that the duplicate is newer than the original.

exactly. They are still tallied, but they don't figure into or bias the subsequent answers. It maybe that 1 week is enough -- but wanted it to be long enough to not affect comments & answers. I'll admit to a bit of conservatism in that regard. It may be that allowing the poster to see the count might be reasonable, though they'd have to be reminded that the final count won't be displayed until later and not to bias the results by talking about early returns.

I recommended not taking action so quickly (or not to be so trigger-happy).

When the answer had been deleted, the only thing I saw was a "why was my post deleted?" which linked to a generic FAQ. There wasn't, when it was deleted, any indication of who deleted or why -- there was only the generic-board message. Later, the mod apologized and undeleted the post, saying that they had based their opinion on an earlier revision. That reply explained the problem. But when it was deleted, I'd already posted an update, so the action didn't make sense (i.e. -- I Had read their feedback and had corrected it -- then it got deleted).

The deletion of a post because someone else has, subjectively, and in their personal opinion, is 'lacking', would likely be felt by many as an antagonistic act -- especially when their opinion isn't universal. To not give someone the benefit of the doubt in an unclear case is also likely to be taken in a negative light. Unless someone is a saint, or simply "doesn't care", I'd think it very likely those feelings would come out in a response or query about the act (the deletion, in this case). In this case there as no mod-message, but a generic, canned, and vague FAQ.

@Ramhound: It's not absolute nor 100%, but overall, yes. Those who know the most tend to realize how much they don't know. Those with the most confidence tend to not realize what's out there. But, again, its a tendency, not an absolute nor certainty. Of course, if you think about it -- if the researchers thought it was an absolute, that might be an indication that they don't know what they are talking about. ;-)

Did I say I was an "authority"? Besides, what is commentary? Most of what I say, I say for a reason, as I don't want to say more than I should, and try to qualify things. So even though I have ~34 years of experience with MS OS's, I haven't read the source, so I don't feel comfortable speaking authoritatively. To do so would feel disingenuous. OTOH, something that is especially true in software: those who who self-rate their abilities most highly are really the least competent. Those with the least confidence in their abilities actually tend to know the most.

Fine. Please try not to be so trigger happy. When I take the time to answer a question, it takes time, (and often many revisions). Too often I've found people have posted quick answers and my answers (which are often longer) that say the same, but also explain more detail, never really get read. I used to compose answers offline, but sometimes they'd take hours for a good answer. But later, I find it was a waste of time. It feels like people posting any short answer to get 'firstpost' on "/.", :-( But I'll certainly try to update an answer if people point out probs.