It forces people to read the comments and judge them on their own merit I understand your argument. Just keep in mind that there are multiple ways that HN is u

It forces people to read the comments and judge them on their own merit I understand your argument. Just keep in mind that there are multiple ways that HN is useful. Some of us want to go deep into a topic, will read all the comments. And some of us are in a hurry and want to a quick feel and extract a summary. In the first case (I call it "researcher mode"), not having votes is a good thing. But it prevents me from browsing in the second mode (the "quick update mode"). I wish you could set this in my preferences, but it wouldn't fulfill pg's original goal of staving the decline of HN (that I don't see - but that's another discussion).