I disagree on comment scores. Not having them makes bandwagoning more likely because I tended to not upvote comments that already have high scores. It does likely make the data more useful to pg though. On technical questions it is painful not having comment scores.
That is exactly what I mean. Before the change you would see a thread of two groups of people with alternating low and high comment scores having a discussion with each other, and it would be clear what HN's groupthink opinion is. Now you have to actually read the comments and make up your own mind. That is true even for technical discussions: the hivemind is not always right.
Why is the metadata so important to so many people on HN? I don't understand it.
Is it a mechanism to find the best comments in a thread? Is it a visualization issue? Is it ego? Is it a voting mechanism to know what others think is important? I honestly do not know.
How about if there was a glyph or color that denoted the amount of votes,views,etc? I think one of the issues was putting a numeric score on an item encouraged upvoting already popular comments.
May be some intelligent coloring would be a good replacement. I just need something that would tell me what comments are likely to be more informative.
For me, it is visualization issue. I used to be able to skim through the comments much faster. Sometimes there was a comment with tons of votes deeply nested in a thread and I would pay attention to it.
