You need to ween yourself off your social proof addiction I think you are making an unwarranted assumption about the OP. The OP, like me, gained a great deal

You need to ween yourself off your social proof addiction I think you are making an unwarranted assumption about the OP. The OP, like me, gained a great deal of value from knowing the vote counts of comments. In much the same way I (and presumably s/he) gain value from knowing the score and comment count of the post itself. Vote counts were not perfect indicator of value, but they were better than having to guess at comment quality by observing the relative position of comments vs posting time. [edit] Interesting. The comments from mixmax (29 minutes ago | http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2495535 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2495535) and blhack (20 minutes ago | http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2495561 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2495561) show higher than my brand new one. Presumably that means quite a few other people have voted them up in agreement