It's not an all-or-nothing. It's an extra piece of information.

There might be valid reasons to remove it (it hurts the community, it leads to negative behavior, .... I forget why they took it off).

But when it comes to trying to assess the quality of the comment, more data is better than less. Then you have the option to weigh it as you see fit, including ignoring it.

>It's not an all-or-nothing. It's an extra piece of information...But when it comes to trying to assess the quality of the comment, more data is better than less.

It could be an extra piece of disinformation, which can make it more difficult to evaluate.

I suppose I'd like it if there was no way to sort. What happens on Reddit is that such comments easily bubble to the top, and they're often wrong, or just making a silly joke rather than being informative.

Well, if we had the vote counts, we could test your conjecture.

We have them in other forums -- e.g. Reddit if I am not mistaken.

Do they work that well there, or do they make the forums a competition for points and popular comments, in other words a popularity contest?

WEB 2.0 turned online discussions into popularity contests. Period. I preferred the older, smaller communities sans likes & upvotes where you knew most in the community and had the ability to 'ignore' MUs. Of course, that had it's drawbacks and is much more difficult to scale as the site gains popularity & evolves. I do not have the answer other than self-moderation, yet, most(including myself) fail sometimes in the heat of emotional impulse... and personal investments, paid actors, other reasons.

As sad as Slahdot is these days, I still think they have a superior moderation system. I like that every vote comes with a reason and that you can use that information to do things like filter out the jokes.