Only 38.5% of users were in favor of comment scores being hidden, but it was decidedly a positive change for the site.
Was it?
When things were transparent, there were no reason to upvote interesting trollish comments.
Now they get blindly up-voted for being interesting. For example, consider this article:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7436401
About 5 facebook engineers are answering questions. They are of course buried by a meta discussion about whether facebook should use PHP at all.
Since the change, I have written a few 50+ karma comments, and all were trolls. The change makes me like my own comments less. Getting a "high score" just requires posting something popular and mildly offensive, where as before, people could weigh, "what conversation is most important".
#1 score 1000
->#2 score 5
#3 score 800
Most really popular posts load 4-5 comments in reply to the actual post in the first page of comments. It's honestly ridiculous. I would really love to be able to collapse comment trees like on reddit, and even better if they aggressively collapsed by default based on their score.
Also I agree that hiding scores was not "decidedly a positive change", for the reason rando289 points out, among other things. It's just so useful information. Sure it changes the way people deal out votes, but in the end it's all about how the posts are sorted, not the individual points, and I doubt the sort-order will change much (and if it does, whether it'd be worse).
"2048 is HN's Flappy Bird"
Hardly enlightening or interesting.
(I'm not sure if this is intentional or not, but interesting none the less.)
Hiding comment karma actually took something away from the community.
If it added something. I did not see it.
Edit: Crap! my comment is pending... I guess I won't get to say it at all.
1) That poll was conducted well after the change. That makes it a very different type of poll.
2) This change has half as much support, if you ignore the wait-and-sees.
So no, it was not widely regarded to be a decidedly positive change.