Ask HN: Why do we show comment scores next to posts?

It's convenient for me when I view my own comments to see which ones have been most appreciated by other HN participants. Agreeing with the above, I know sometimes a comment can fail to gain upvotes because it is controversial (or because it is in a thread, or subthread, that has become inactive), but usually a comment with a lot of upvotes is worth a look.

If the purpose is to encourage good comments, I think the effect would be preserved if scores only appeared to the original poster. And by making the change, readers would score comments more effectively.

I've also been reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, and he discusses how initial estimates anchor our opinions. That is, if I see a comment scored as X, I may be inclined to believe that X is close to the true score. But do comments actually have true scores? Perhaps they should be scored by the individual in a ternary fashion (up, down, no vote). In the past, I've voted down insightful comments because I thought they were over-rated.

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My thoughts:

-Getting a comment grayed out is pretty embarrassing; this wouldn't change that.

-Would the incentivisation disappear if only the poster could see the score?

-Groupthink would be discouraged

-I'm not motivated by the vain glory of having a highly rated comment [i.e., I'm not motivated by other people knowing my comment is highly rated]. I'm motivated by making an intelligent contribution to the discussion that, hopefully, others recognize as intelligent. I'm also motivated by increasing my overall karma score. I see it as a game of sorts.

With a large board there's a lot of anchoring that's going on.

It'd be nice if there were another way to encourage them.