You have a conversation between two people who disagree about a fact. They both can't be true, but short of people posting useless "I agree" or "you are right/wrong", there's no way to tell which is right and which is wrong.
Too many times have I seen people downvoted because they provide an unpopular perspective on a topic. This results in HN turning into a circle jerk of similar discussions/ideas and avoids some of the most truly interesting conversations. To me, this is the single biggest threat to HN.
Why would anyone mention any radical ideas when the masses downvote them because it does not match their own?
I promise you that you can figure out which is right and which is wrong with out without knowing the karma.
I didn't think the goal was to remove the social benefits that come from crowd sourcing. Now, unless a comment has a negative score, we need to waste time to filter something that others could have already filtered for us.
How does it do that? People who post comments are still going to get karma for upvotes.
"I didn't think the goal was to remove the social benefits that come from crowd sourcing."
Comments which get more upvotes still tend to drift to the top of the screen over time. So there is still some indication of which comments probably got more upvotes (they're the ones near the top of the screen).
Whether that's really much of a benefit or not to revealing a given comment's upvotes is debatable. Apart from some really trollish or contentless comments, I don't think the number of votes on comments is particularly indicative of their quality.
As pg stated in the original thread which motivated the change to hiding the upvotes for comments:
"The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696
Hiding the upvotes that comments get reduces the tendency of people to vote with the herd. It also gets people to read more comments and read them more carefully.
I think overall this is an improvement, but not an unqualified one (for reasons discussed elsewhere in this thread and others). As I've stated elsewhere, it might be further improved by revealing the number of votes a given comment has gotten to each user who votes on that comment only after they've voted on it. That will encourage voting and still discourage voting with the herd.