You have a conversation between two people who disagree about a fact. They both can't be true, but short of people posting useless "I agree" or "you are right/wrong", there's no way to tell which is right and which is wrong.
Up/down arrows are not synonyms for agree/disagree but are supposed to reward people for providing valuable additions to the conversation.
Too many times have I seen people downvoted because they provide an unpopular perspective on a topic. This results in HN turning into a circle jerk of similar discussions/ideas and avoids some of the most truly interesting conversations. To me, this is the single biggest threat to HN.
Why would anyone mention any radical ideas when the masses downvote them because it does not match their own?
I thought the point of removing the scores was to de-incentivize (??) people from posting for karma. Or, put another way, to improve the quality of comments.
I didn't think the goal was to remove the social benefits that come from crowd sourcing. Now, unless a comment has a negative score, we need to waste time to filter something that others could have already filtered for us.
"I thought the point of removing the scores was to de-incentivize (??) people from posting for karma."
How does it do that? People who post comments are still going to get karma for upvotes.
"I didn't think the goal was to remove the social benefits that come from crowd sourcing."
Comments which get more upvotes still tend to drift to the top of the screen over time. So there is still some indication of which comments probably got more upvotes (they're the ones near the top of the screen).
Whether that's really much of a benefit or not to revealing a given comment's upvotes is debatable. Apart from some really trollish or contentless comments, I don't think the number of votes on comments is particularly indicative of their quality.
As pg stated in the original thread which motivated the change to hiding the upvotes for comments:
"The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."
Hiding the upvotes that comments get reduces the tendency of people to vote with the herd. It also gets people to read more comments and read them more carefully.
I think overall this is an improvement, but not an unqualified one (for reasons discussed elsewhere in this thread and others). As I've stated elsewhere, it might be further improved by revealing the number of votes a given comment has gotten to each user who votes on that comment only after they've voted on it. That will encourage voting and still discourage voting with the herd.
I think it's more to avoid groupthink, posting for karma would only make sense if you couldn't see your own scores, and also, it would probably involve removing the karma leaderboard.
Possible feature if karmaless posts are kept:
Allow users with certain levels of karma to create a poll on a comment. It would allow people to see what the masses are thinking without spawning a thousand I-agree posts, but still let the really vocal people post comments.
You have a conversation between two people who disagree about a fact. They both can't be true, but short of people posting useless "I agree" or "you are right/wrong", there's no way to tell which is right and which is wrong.