This place should be a venue for peer revue Upvotes and downvotes are part of the peer review here. It helps signal who tends to say something of value consist

This place should be a venue for peer revue Upvotes and downvotes are part of the peer review here. It helps signal who tends to say something of value consistently. I have been here a while. This issue gets brought up over and over, presumably by new-ish people who didn't see the last zillion discussions. They used to show vote count next to comments. It caused nasty discussions as people vied for the most validation for their side of the argument. This got the then mod dragged into a lot of things, a thing he didn't appreciate. So he hid the counts and saw a steep drop in how much he got dragged into such messes. So he was not inclined to go back to showing them when this caused a stink from the user base as people felt that knowing the score for each comment was useful information...blah blah blah. Social stuff is inevitably a messy affair. HN does it far better than average. I respectfully suggest you consider the possibility that what you consider to be a bug is really a feature and part of why things run as relatively well as they do here, in spite of being a space where (large numbers of disparate) people come together. Best.