[irq]

Completely agree that this should be a standard feature, and I think it's a big mistake that it wasn't introduced back when comment score visibility was removed.

Back then, I used a comment's score as a way of finding more interesting comments. I totally understand why this feature was removed, however, without it, I'm left to look for comments that get a lot of replies to weed out the boring comments from the interesting ones, and keeping track of indentation while scrolling through hundreds of comments is tedious. I'm sitting in front of a computer that should be able to do this for me.

[orik]

Perhaps this is a feature that would make the comments on hacker news worse?

I'd be interested if they tested it, but I can't say for certain if I think it should become a feature or not.

[krapp]

I don't see how it could possibly make the comments worse, if for no other reason than people are already using plugins to accomplish this. Either the damage has already been done, or it's not relevant.

[Normal_gaussian]

I would imagine most users do not use plugins. Though I would be interested if it's possible to get statistics for this.