>I really can't think of any reason why you'd want to show score before voting. It really depends on whether you see yourself as a Hacker News reader, or as a

>I really can't think of any reason why you'd want to show score before voting. It really depends on whether you see yourself as a Hacker News reader, or as a Hacker News editor. It's just like Amazon: If I'm a customer, I want to hear what everyone else thinks about something. But if I were hiring someone to be a professional reviewer for Amazon, I'd hide the other ratings to make them as objective as possible. So here are two ways ratings make HN a more pleasant experience: - If I have limited time to go through HN, I want to be able to zoom in on the comments others judged to be of the highest quality. - If the comment is on a topic I have little familiarity with, it's often hard to judge its accuracy/validity on my own. A decent number of votes gives me confidence that the person is right. So in these respects, it's just like Google rankings or Amazon ratings. Having points probably does cause some amount of groupthink. I bet hiding votes would scrunch the distribution of votes around the mean. By the way, if HN's database contains the exact sequence of upmods/downmods for a particular story, e.g. 1, 1, -1, -1, -1, 1, ..., it would be possible to test how much groupthink is involved by modeling the sequence of votes as a random walk and testing how much the probability of an upmod/downmod is conditional on the current number of votes. Or, if HN starts hiding votes, you could analyze how this affects voting patterns. Sounds like an interesting college stats/psychology project for someone :)