zlacker

My initial reaction was to disagree with your suggestion: Your method would train people to predict how well a comment is going to be received and to vote based on that. I disagreed, because I don't want to read comments rated by the hive mind, in order to please the hive mind.

However, at a second glance, your idea could work. If people see diverse and insightful comments being voted up, perhaps the hive could learn to encourage creative and interesting comments.

Then again, this would incentivize upvoting comments with an existing positive score, and vice versa.

Perhaps the solution is to not display comment scores at all until you vote on a comment. (But order comments the same way they are ordered now.)

>>nyelli+(OP)
Reddit does this pretty well, they often feature a submission with a dot instead of the number of votes. Perhaps HN could randomly put a thread at the top without showing votes.

>>Elbert+G3
I believe Reddit does this for the first X hours of a submissions life - to discourage bandwagons, and so that newer submissions that may otherwise be overlooked (due to having less initial upvotes) will get a chance. I agree that it's a good idea and something that may work well on HN's new page.