which is of course a good reason. The problem is that there are some rather heavy casualties that come from not showing points. - It's very hard, if not impos

which is of course a good reason. The problem is that there are some rather heavy casualties that come from not showing points. - It's very hard, if not impossible to scan a thread for good comments. Busy people don't have time to read through a whole thread to pick out the good comments. - I did a back of the envelope calculation here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2569997 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2569997 that shows that there is no way to assess the scores of around 50% of the comments. If there isn't a good way of assessing which comments are deemd good by the community is the system working properly? - When a poster postulates something and is refuted by a sibling it's impossible to know who is right. Points give you a gauge of what HN as a community thinks. For instance, if a user comments that you should always use Bcrypt and a sibling replies that this is simply wrong I don't know what is right and wrong, even though it may be obvious to someone knowledgeable in encryption. Points give you a good header. - When you don't show points people tend to vote less. Without having seen the numbers I'm confident that voting has decreased significantly. If noone is voting (or even worse, only a subset of opiniated users vote) then we're back to a threaded discussion ordered by randomness. - As I remember it one of the original reasons for hiding points was to stop the "piling on" where already popular comments got more upvotes. You posted at some point that comments which had a lot of points before actually have more points after the don't-show-points change. Hiding scores to reduce arguments seems like a very crude and inelegant way of solving the problem. You solve one problem but effectively render the scoring system useless in the process.