| I'm a mostly-lurker. I only comment when I something to say that surpasses my fairly high threshold of "worth spending other peoples' time on". On this issue, I'll break my pattern and post my half-formed thoughts, because to me HN was much more valuable with scores shown. The two main reasons: 1. Being able to skim just the top few comments allows me to read the threads, even on posts I'm not initially that interested in. Without the scores, I have to make an immediate judgement of whether I want to wade through hundreds of comments to find the diamonds in the rough. I feel like I'm now limiting myself on HN to only those issues I already know about. 2. I'd like to think that people might occasionally notice the more informative of my comments, infrequent though they may be. Without scores, my ideas may be drowned out by the quantity of other posts, which discourages me from commenting. I understand the need to avoid comment wars, though the fact they're happening at all is rather disappointing. (Is the HN community really that petty that out-scoring those you're talking with is felt necessary, and rewarded? I'd like to think not!) But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater: Leave some way to separate the wheat from the chaff. I don't really care whether it's low-precision indicators, or clamped scores, or a setting to filter the highest comments, just so long as there's something. |