I've talked about this a lot with friends, and while voting on aggregated content seems like an obviously good idea, voting on comments is not. On HN it's not a

I've talked about this a lot with friends, and while voting on aggregated content seems like an obviously good idea, voting on comments is not. On HN it's not a huge problem because it's generally easy enough to read all the comments in a thread, but in busier threads (for examples see popular forums on reddit), minority viewpoints are quickly and efficiently hidden from view. The system is very effective at promoting the most popular viewpoint (at the expensive of every other quality), which makes comment threads boring and predictable.