[steveblgh]

In the same time a feature idea for news.yc & reddit:

the number of votes on a comment should become visible only after someone voted already, similarly to online polls. This would prevent people from mindlessly agreeing with popular opinion, and in the same time it would encourage more people to vote, out of curiosity to see the result.

[LogicHoleFlaw]

One issue there is that I know I personally decline to mod people if they already have a large positive or negative balance on a single post. (There are some posts which I think should sit at 0 rather than -30, or even -5, for example.) If I have to mod someone to see what others mods were then I will be much more likely to unintentionally karma-bomb someone when I really just want to see what other hackers here thought about their post.