For what it's worth, I think it's been a big improvement. It forces me to focus more on the content of individual posts, it's made me more careful with my own a

For what it's worth, I think it's been a big improvement. It forces me to focus more on the content of individual posts, it's made me more careful with my own allocation of points, and--I know this this fuzzy and subjective--I think it's improved the quality of discourse. Which ultimately is the only metric that really matters here. Maybe that's just a temporary thing; people change their behavior when they know they're being observed. But I'd urge you to keep it for a little while longer. I like the idea of a more coarse-grained system, perhaps one that uses font weight or shades of grey to emphasize and de-emphasize certain areas of the conversation, weighted perhaps towards the dialog around a particular comment rather than the comment itself. Perhaps over time that would come to suffer from the same problems as the last system. But hiding the algorithm allows you to readjust it before people have the chance to reverse-engineer and game it. Numerical point systems are useful sometimes, but they tend to activate humans' incentive structures in some really negative ways.