I find that my comment scores are higher and my comments more civil if I delete some of the comments I make. These days, I tend to write it, read it, then half

I find that my comment scores are higher and my comments more civil if I delete some of the comments I make. These days, I tend to write it, read it, then half the time delete it. What you might want to do is give the commenter themselves a signal, more explicit than just a bad score or being grayed out. A message could pop up by the comment saying "likely to be downvoted, you are advised to delete this" - and see if more self-policing helps. Also, if you have some signal that occurs before votes or other comments show up (like a lot of eyeballs on a comment with no upvotes), then maybe you can use that to give users an early signal to delete their comment.