[famousactress]

So here's my observation of what I think has changed.. I think the hidden scores have made the comment scoring higher in contrast.

By that I mean that I think the standard deviation in scores has gotten much higher, and the top few posts end up with higher scores than they used to.. for better or worse. I've had comments that were useful but far from brilliant end up with 40+ points, and I think the biggest reason is momentum. I think being able to see the scores was probably giving people an opportunity to say "10 points, yep.. that's a 10 point comment" and leave it alone.

So.. if that's true (and it'd be great to see numbers to back up or refute it).. then I'm not sure if it's better or worse.. but I'd tend to think it's not a great thing, since it makes it more likely that early useful comments are voted better than later brilliant ones.

At any rate. That's my take on a flaw that I haven't heard anyone else mention.

[fr0sty]

A suggestion that has been given (which I second) is to have 'bucketed' scores above some threshold:

-4,-3,-2,-1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5+, 10+

[wvenable]

I've noticed that myself. Asking a question got me a 10+ point score on a comment that would have previously garnered only 2-3 points tops.

I don't really bother to vote that much anymore; I realized that I had previously only upvoted good comments that had low scores.