I already like what HN does with the colour of posts. What if HN switched to colour only? Displaying points
* encourages "karma whoring" by posters or just makes people care about how well their comment was received
* biases the decision to upvote/not by subsequent readers. Subconscious, conscious, contrarian, consensus-seeking, whatever -- shouldn't people make up their own minds as to whether a comment was good or not, on its merits rather than on what the rest of the community thought?
The information filtering function would still be accomplished by colour and order only.