My problem with showing the point score is that it can lead to a share of the score being due to popularity rather than quality. Some people will uprate comment

My problem with showing the point score is that it can lead to a share of the score being due to popularity rather than quality. Some people will uprate comments that they might otherwise consider too marginal to uprate, if they see that everyone else is uprating that comment. More commonly, moderators are also readers and will only want to read the highest valued comments if they are short on time, and then these become the only comments that they issue any ratings for. Even without point scores, a comment's relative score can still be inferred from the system floating high-scoring comments to the top while comments with negative scores are displayed in a shade of gray. Readers are given hints to what the community currently considers valuable, but moderators have to read the comment to be sure.