It's an analogy. Without publicly viewable karma, posts lose a lot of their information content. Polls without results lose more, but some would argue[1] that

It's an analogy. Without publicly viewable karma, posts lose a lot of their information content. Polls without results lose more, but some would argue[1] that there is no royal road to understanding what others think, and that the best way to use polls is to simply read the possible responses and ignore the results. For example, [1] believes that if you saw a poll on "which database do you use?", you should ignore the poll results and researching each option on your own. The person he is replying to is advocating researching databases in HN popularity order. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3122546 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3122546