i was wondering why we are not allowed to see the people are voting on posts, is this like a technical issue, or a political one(conflict), i dont get it thanks
Complementing pg's answer here about "social choice".
It places the focus squarely on the news content and not on the users involved. There's no following and there's no cronyism this way.
In many services, such as twitter and quora, I've noticed that there is some degree of reciprocity that occurs even if it is neither expressed or implied that you should reciprocate. In fact, in most cases there is nothing written or unwritten culturally that says you should reciprocate, yet people do anyways.
By eliminating this you eliminate this falsely perceived social expectation of reciprocity, thus placing 100% of voting motivation on content. This is the right approach if you want stories and comments to make it to the front page based on quality of content alone.
"quid pro quo" i didnt know what it means, but it sounded pretty kool, just checked it on wiki, it sounds so british, im a londoner myself, fantasttic use of words @brudgers
Occasionally, a single comment can get over 100 points. The site may not want to keep track of that many links to a single post. (Not that I know why it works the way it does, but this seems like a good technical reason for it.)
Sites like reddit can garner thousands of votes on a certain comment. Keeping track of these would further decrease reddit's already slow response time.
