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But it's not necessarily about judging a comment for an upvote/downvote. The number can be used to gauge whether you should stop and read something carefully.

by detst 15y ago

But it's not necessarily about judging a comment for an upvote/downvote. The number can be used to gauge whether you should stop and read something carefully. Maybe an expert comes along and makes an extremely informative comment and maybe I just scan it. Seeing a bunch of upvotes indicates that I should probably slow down and try to learn something from it. Or maybe a well-reasoned debate has a large voting discrepancy. I value the collective judgement of the HN community and this information helps me learn from the arguments. The value of this exceeds the more fair voting that we might have now.

brudgers 15y ago
>"The value of this exceeds the more fair voting that we might have now." In your argument, you are using yourself as the measure of value, rather than using the community, i.e. saving you as an individual time by helping you ignore the less popular side of an argument doesn't demonstrably improve the quality of comments of the community in general (or even your comments in particular - though it may help you choose which side to comment on in order to maximize the upvotes your comments receive). In the case where a "well-reasoned" debate has a large discrepancy then using points as a measure of value indicates an interpretation of votes as agreement with ideas rather than an objective indication of a comment's quality.