Re:HN comments are underrated
by angry_octet on Sunday October 23, 2016 @10:42AM
(#12773757)
It would be good if the vote counts became visible after a time period, say 7 days. That way when people re-visit a topic the most appreciated comments are visible.
You can get the scores on old comments through search. Since, to a first approximation, the average 7 day old thread gets zero viewers, it seems unlikely to be worth the energy to add new features just for them. But if you think it's worth doing, you should mail Dan and Scott at [email protected].
Vote counts were struck because they were causing fights.
Paul Graham decided to risk sacrificing a little bit of comprehensibility in exchange for some extra civility. I think the tradeoff has worked very well --- especially because incivility crowds out comprehensibility anyways, so that almost anything you do to make a thread more civil will have the knock-on benefit of making it easier to read.