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I think points do a good job of positioning comments in a thread as you can easily pick out the common consensus, one thing that would be nice if it was encoura

• chrischen 17y ago
  On the downside exposing points can lead to bias. You could easily make up your mind based on the points. It discourages individual thinking, and frankly if someone is too lazy to analyze and filter out the good comments for him/herself do we really want his/her opinion? It can result in less accurate filtering. Popular comments may be voted up simply because someone sees the amount of points, skims the comment with perhaps a bare understanding, and thinks "hey, this guy's probably right." And then, ding, a possibly unwarranted upvote. The same effect can apply to an unpopular comment, but the effect is probably stronger for unpopular comments, which is why I think it is so dangerous. An unpopular comment would suffer more of this effect because people who disagree may build up more negative emotions, and this emotion may lead to more impulsive, irrational behavior making them more susceptible to the bias. Seeing a comment he/she disagree with, and seeing that a bunch of people agree with him/her about disagreeing gives that person a sense of approval which erodes his/her ability to truly evaluate a dissenting comment objectively.