I like seeing comment points but I'm not sure that it's a good thing to display them. Threads are already sorted by comment score so that the best comments are close to the top - I'm not sure what additional benefit comes from seeing the actual snapshot numbers aside from sheer curiosity.
Threads are sorted by comment score and by age, with newer threads floating to the top. I think this is a great heuristic.
My only beef is that this also naturally floats poor replies to great comments. It would be nice to have a good heuristic to know when to read the replies and when to move on to the next thread. I think one does exist: expandos. Give us the ability to expand and compact threads, and then automatically compact any old replies that haven't received a reasonable number of upvotes. I use the extension from hckrnews.com to give me expandos, but intelligent compaction would be so much sweeter.
Just as bad as uplifting poor replies to great comments, it pushes down great replies to poor comments. I've seen some threads were the most informative and insightful comment was halfway down the page because it was a reply correcting misconceptions.
The only solution I can think of are collapsable threads, similar to reddit.
+/- expansion/contraction seems like a good idea to me too. It would be a good way for me to hide the occasional off topic argument between a couple of individuals and to find the grand.. parent of a comment.
I agree. Also it creates a halo effect. And creates more incentive to click either up or down depending on how you view the number relative to your own opinion. Not having a count gives new comments a chance (since you don't automatically look at the "minutes ago" part). So a new comment can be not at the bottom giving it a chance to gain more exposure even though it has no points.
We had this discussion back when the points were being hidden, and I went through a few posts with many comments to see whether it would be possible to find the good comments based on where they were in the thread.
It turned out that because of the threaded comment system you get very little information about which comments have many votes and which don't. In the sample I checked it was impossible to get any idea of how popular a comment was around 50% of the time (this comment for instance, which is currently the only child to your comment could hav 0 upvotes or it could have 100. There's no way to know)
The solution, I think, is some sort of "unthreaded" view (with link to the contextual "threaded" view). Because, even if you do see the score, it is unlikely anyone will notice a +1000 answer to a -2 top level post when there are 20 of the latter.
The numbers themselves don't (and shouldn't) matter - only the rank.
