Did anyone experiment yet with a tree-like comment system (just like the one on HN) that completely hides comment points (even in the profile pages and to the users themselves)? To me it seems that, contrary to the intentions to achieve high quality comments, the crowd often optimizes for low effort and high score. Maybe the lack of publicly visible reputations points could reduce that high score mentality. Maybe we are all wrong with this kind of behavioristic approach.

Spam and trolls would still be punished and one would still have the benefits of having the most favored comments at the top.