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Comment by vaporstun | Hacker News Reader

Correct me if I am wrong, but it appears the good is still bubbling to the top, simply the metric has been removed.

I find that I often instinctively head to upvote a comment that has hit its critical mass in terms of karma votes regardless of its content. I have to take a second, back off from my instinctual action, and evaluate. Often I end up upvoting it anyway upon reading it, but at least then I have taken the time to evaluate it myself.

Not having the points present makes this problem go away because there is no implicit "lots of people like this, I probably will to" reaction. The jury is still out on whether or not I think things are ultimately helped or hurt by the move but I believe it is worthwhile for the sake of experiment if nothing else.

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With no indication of number of upvotes, though, there is no distinction between a 200-point comment on top versus a 2-point comment that happens to be on top. Sometimes it was easier to skip parts of a thread knowing approximately how many upvotes each post received.

It should be the content of the posts that matter not the point total.

Why not show the comment score after you vote on the comment?

That misses the point - the comment score helps you decide which comments to read given time constraints.

You could make it so that as comments get more votes, the time that they were written becomes less important in ranking them.

What I recommended would encourage more voting, so you could just read the most highly ranked comments with some confidence about quality -- poor comments would probably be downvoted quickly.

Bluntly, I don't want to read every comment.

You don't have to. Highly voted comments are helpfully floated to the top of the thread or post. Just read a few at the top and you should be good to go.

Yes, but regardless of how valuable comments are in relation to each other, it is still no indication of how valuable they are independently.

For instance, the top comment at the top of the page may have 10 karma and 50 replies, while the next valuable comment has 15 karma (but was submitted 3 hours earlier), and isn't visible until halfway down the page. Without the karma displayed, it's much more difficult to skim the thread. And for all I know, the rest of the comments only have 1 point.

Interesting -- I never paid much attention to the relative weights, because I figured that the piling on effect was always taking place. So I used karma to figure out which contents to start to read, by some sort of ad hoc guess at what overall karma % a comment had in a thread.

Plus, I recall from my reddit days that the earliest comments are way more likely to receive votes. So I always ended up trying to divide the karma by the time since post, which just distracted me.

Different strokes I s'pose.

Replies to the top level comment are still surfaced regardless of their value. So there is no visual queue available to me to filter out replies and secondary comments by estimated value.

Not to be rude, but that may be part of the problem.

Nah. How's anyone supposed to create anything if they're busy reading HN all day? I have enough trouble as is.

I enjoy reading comment threads for subjects I know little about. Without the comment karma, I have no idea which comments are even valid, let alone valuable.

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