I'm not inclined to. Hiding points seems to decrease the intensity and perhaps also the number of fights, as I'd hoped.

I'd be more interested in something that'd prevent this situation from happening:

    smartest comment
    --smart reply
    ----more discussion
    ----more discussion
    ------correction on more discussion
    --smart-ish reply
    ----more discussion
    ----more discussion
    ----more discussion
    ------not-so-smart reply
    ----uninteresting reply
    ----downvoted comment
    ------comment on why parent was a bad comment
    ------another comment that's essentially the same thing
    ----a bunch more downvoted comments
    2nd smartest comment
    [etc.]

A possible solution could be to collapse all the replies except for the few quality ones and show a [more] link, much like reddit.

EDIT: This very comment exemplifies my point perfectly.

This is off-topic, but since PG reads this thread:

Please add back the "by " in front of each comment. It was useful because if I wanted to see all comments by PG on a page, I could Ctrl-F and just look for "by pg" but now I can't -- if I just search for "pg" I get people talking about you, rather than only comments by you.

A very small UI tweak probably to remove clutter, but it served a purpose, albeit a very small one. :-)

-David

A tangential question for PG: whatever happened to perhaps showing logarithmic point values?

If I remember correctly, you were seriously considering this.

Personally, I like it better without the points now. But I do still wish there was an indicator of high-quality comments (I think you said you were considering an orange dot?).

There's a huge difference between an opinion held by one person and one held by 100 people.

All it's done is freeze the status quo. Nobody votes any more, so those users who had lots of points at the cut off get to exercise their extra powers, and the rest of us just have learn to be good little serfs. I for one have come here less because the voting has become so pointless.

I realized the current system works pretty damn well when I thought "I wish these were points were visible!" upon seeing a heavily up-voted comment of mine. I quickly realized that this is a really bad concern to have when commenting. There is such a fine but significant difference between getting feedback that let's you know people like what you say, and publicly displaying it. The former is the natural desire to be right/smart/insightful, the latter is actually the desire to appear right/smart/insightful to others.

I think we've all seen this pattern of fame at any scale: Smart but unnoticed person finally gets attention for their work, people notice this and the person appears smart and worth listening to, after time the person's focus shifts from the smart work they did to work maintaining the reputation of being smart.

I think it's great to get some form of acknowledgment that your ideas are generating positive feedback, this encourage thoughtful comments and provides a real reward to those primitive parts of our brain that want to be the big monkey. But any further and the big monkey starts to be the one doing the talking.

It'd be useful to have 1 point comments marked somehow.

I suspect I am not the only one who uses downvoting as a way to sink unwanted comments down the thread, but since newer comments are given a position boost, it is not always clear if a comment floats near the top because it is popular or because it is new. It'd be nice to tell these cases apart (as a short-term fix).

I don't think I've voted for a parent level comment since the point were hidden, with the possible exception of downvoting a few trolls. Not having points displayed probably does help prevent fighting and pandering, but it also makes the ordering of comments instinctively feel arbitrary. It's quite possible that the pros outweigh the cons.

"I find it rather disorientating not having them, as it makes it more difficult to know which comments to read."

This is a telling admission, in my opinion.

I love the newer, non-points display. Skim through the comments and read the ones that seem most interesting to you. Otherwise, the discussions quickly degrade into thoughtless popularity contests.

I've noticed that since points have become private, people have become more likely to contribute their up/downvotes...

A comment that used to get 10 points, now gets 15-20.

Perhaps allowing points to be visible after a fews days would be a suitable compromise?

I'll ask again (as I've done in past point discussions):

Why not have these be visible by the people who want them, and invisible to people who don't want them? Perhaps "off by default" but something that can be enabled in registered accounts.

Unrelated, but I'm not sure where I should submit bug reports:

I just tried to submit a story for the first time in a while (weeks? months?) and got the error "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."

Maybe have points become visible after you upvote a comment? That way there's no influence on which comments to upvote, but you get some validation.

Anyway, points on comments doesn't say if a comment is good or bad; it says if people agree or not with it.

when it comes to unhelpful comments being (sometimes) voted to the top, why is hacker news "one user, one vote"? why not weight the votes? eg. why not weight users by running pagerank over the vote graph?

I'd hate to see a Reddit-esque "fuzz" algorithm used here. IMO, the various hacks applied by Reddit do nothing but confuse people (who then waste bandwidth complaining about being "downvoted") and deny useful feedback to commenters who actually care about their scores.

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