My personal observation has been that, while blind-folding might have been good for curation of the comments, by avoiding the bandwagon effect, but it has serious ill-effects on the readability, especially for the new subject matter for the reader.
In the past, there were 2 signals of the comment-quality in the thread.
1. Vote count.
2. Positioning in the thread.
Now, that Vote count is not visible, There is only one signal left.
1. Positioning in the thread.
It makes it very difficult to segregate good comments from the bad ones, and decide which comments add to the topic, and hence worth reading/discussing, especially on a large thread, on a new subject matter, reader does not understand very-well.
Few suggestions to improve the comment readability of the thread.
1. Would it make sense to hide the comment count of a thread till a particular threshold (say votes < 7, comment time < 10 mins), or of the entire thread comments (thread time < 30 mins, number of comments < 30) and the likes, and make them visible to add to the readability/visibility of the thread?
I feel that there is more than simply impact on the readability but also on the semantics.
When I feel clueless about a topic I look to comments with up votes to get a general feel for the direction of the discussion and hints how to educate myself on the topic.
On your first suggestion: Maybe it is hard to work with absolute thresholds as the amount of votes is probably proportional to how long something stays on the front page. Maybe there is some measure to determine when a thread has begun to "settle" down and that would be the time to make votes visible.
>There was always a huge first-mover advantage to getting a high scoring comment
It's right for good comments that are read by more people to receive more votes. Also that the first person to make a particular comment should be higher voted as repetition of the same insight isn't improving the thread.
> Now, that Vote count is not visible, There is only one signal left.
> 1. Positioning in the thread.
I'm not sure if positioning in the thread is much of a signal. Comments with a low vote replying to a comment with a high vote will get displayed above comments with a medium vote, and will more likely be read. Before, the reader could choose to ignore such comments, and keep on scrolling down to check for other comments with a high enough vote.
What about adding greenness to comments? Comments which are in order are black no matter what, but if a comment is above another comment with more upvotes because it's newer then it's slightly green to indicate the disparity in votes.
In the past, there were 2 signals of the comment-quality in the thread.
1. Vote count.
2. Positioning in the thread.
Now, that Vote count is not visible, There is only one signal left.
1. Positioning in the thread.
It makes it very difficult to segregate good comments from the bad ones, and decide which comments add to the topic, and hence worth reading/discussing, especially on a large thread, on a new subject matter, reader does not understand very-well.
Few suggestions to improve the comment readability of the thread.
1. Would it make sense to hide the comment count of a thread till a particular threshold (say votes < 7, comment time < 10 mins), or of the entire thread comments (thread time < 30 mins, number of comments < 30) and the likes, and make them visible to add to the readability/visibility of the thread?
2. Would it help if the up-votes are capped?