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Comment by entangld | Hacker News Reader

HN isn't only opinions. It also gives advice. How would you HNers who don't like points get advice in an area you know nothing about? What indicators would you use? Whatever sounds the best? Seeing a cumulative score of the opinions of intelligent users helps me.

Perhaps some of you know much more than me and don't need to learn anything. I'm not in that boat. HN helps me learn how other entrepreneurs think and what they think about areas that I'm moving into. This isn't reddit. This is a serious forum and seeing which advice gets the most upvotes helps me tremendously.

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This is why I voted for points as well. When people put their site up and ask HN for feedback, you can easily see the most critical advice based on the points score. Without it, people have to start posting "I agree that's really important" underneath. Just like I have here.

Edit: Perhaps a hybrid option would be to just enable points for Ask HN's where people are specifically requesting feedback.

That's not a bad idea.

I think it'd be neat if whoever posts anything can choose whether to have comment scores display in the discussion thread, at least until/unless the community decides that one way is definitely better than the other (since opinions seem about equally divided right now).

[Summary]Comment points are a way of outsourcing BS detection to people with considerably more knowledge than me.

I don't consider myself knowledgeable enough in the fields covered within hackernews to weed out the genuinely sagely advice from the erudite crap. I learn a huge amount from coming here and I feel I have lost a tool which helped me judge what I needed to dig into and study and what is just todays kool aid/lie/misunderstanding. I hope they get brought back, even just as an option.

Whatever sounds best.

Someone who gives good advice who can't justify it, isn't giving good advice.

Plus, if somebody gives bad advice, other people are likely to comment and point it out.

I think there are some kinds of things where you really do need raw numbers (this thread for example), or "which front page is most aesthetically appleaing for my website," and those kinds of things can use polls (as this thread does).

EDIT: On second thought, after reading what some others have said, I think there really are some Ask HNs that could use comment scores (but I don't think all of them need it).

Note that, even without points displayed, you can gauge the relative points of comments by their order on the page. While very new comments can appear briefly at the top, the comments that stay there have high points.

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