One place (perhaps the only place) where I find points valuable is when people offer more fact-oriented comments rather than opinions and anecdotes. For exampl

One place (perhaps the only place) where I find points valuable is when people offer more fact-oriented comments rather than opinions and anecdotes. For example, in a discussion on some aspect of law (I don't come to HN for law advice, but nonetheless sometimes there are interesting tidbits to consider), it would help to have comment scores to know whether a given piece of "fact" is strongly or weakly corroborated by the community. Another example might be peoples' experiences with cloud storage - I don't know anything about cloud storage, so if a thread goes into a discussion on pros and cons of specific providers, I would be interested to know how many others have had the same experience. (I guess this is an anecdote too; but one on matters for which there could be a "right answer" in contrast to peoples' opinions of TSA screening practices.) This usually works fairly well on stackoverflow; answers are usually (certainly not all the time!) voted based on their technical merit. Slashdot does a similar thing: comments are rated based on a category. An upvote for "+5 funny" in the HN world could carry less weight than "+5 insightful", because it is the latter that we want to bubble to the top.