zlacker

>>pg+(OP)
Stop showing people other people's comment scores. They stimulate argumentative comments.

>>tptace+k
I do like that idea. I think I tried it a while ago, but users complained that without comment scores it was too hard to figure out what were the most interesting comments in a thread.

Is there some other way to show what the most interesting comments in a thread are? How about if I displayed the point totals for subtrees, but not for individual leaves? Would it solve the problem if you could follow other users, and see their comments graphically distinguished in some way?

Another problem is that people use point scores as a guide to voting. It's clear from voting patterns that many if not most users vote not to express approval or disapproval, but to cause the comment to have what they believe is an appropriate number of points. If I didn't display points, people couldn't do that. Perhaps that's not a problem. But if it turned out that that's what voting was for, then this could break voting, which would in turn break the sorting of comments, which would be a problem now that there are so many.

>>pg+V
So you have two problems: users need to be able to figure out what are good comments to read, and correspondingly you want users to vote on comments that make good reading.

Have you thought at all about discerning between vote value based on some metric? You'd need something that doesn't disproportionately disadvantage new users.

>>dochtm+J6
Elsewhere in this thread I proposed a scheme that meets both of your requirements: it discerns votes based on a metric (how closely the voters vote to your own preferences), and it doesn't disadvantage new users:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2405266