I had to think about this a bit, and I disagree so far. I'm finding that I'm not pre-judging comments as much. It's nice to be able to read someone's comment without knowing first that 70 or 80 or 3 other people thought it was worthwhile.
However, it also eliminate the ability for me to reference a comment with a high score with the understanding it's probably more correct. After all, once I read a comment, I want to know if what others think. Comment scores help that. Granted, it's not the only solution. Having some other visual indicator that suggests a comment is of high quality would be good without needing to resort to simply displaying points.
Replies to comments solve the "I want to know what others think" problem. I agree with the previous commenter: having the comment ratings hidden was unusual at first but I definitely do acknowledge that I used to mentally pre-judge a comment based purely on others' responses to it, despite having dealt multiple times with comments that I disagreed with which had higher upvote counts than the ones I felt were better answers.
I disagree. First, disconnect the actual score with something that indicates a high quality comment. You can display something as high quality without showing a score.
Next, a high quality comment need not have comments. Some of the best comments do not need followup. We should also discourage comments that merely parrot the parent and offer no content of their own. This is probably the biggest argument I have against not having any soft of indicator. If a comment is good, it deserves an up vote to indicate quality.
Next, replies still do not solve the scanning problem. For me to deduce the quality comments using replies requires I read through all the comments. Sometimes this is not an issue, but posts with a larger number of comments, this becomes problematic.
Finally, the above also means that replies of comments, and replies of replies, suddenly makes it really difficult what others deem quality content.
At the end of the day, up voting comments is meant to distinguish good, high quality comments from the normal run of the mill comments. If it's not being used for that, then up votes are merely being used as a way to obtain karma. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that by removing karma from showing which posts are of higher quality, it serves no real purpose other than to obtain more karma. I'm more interested in reading quality comments than obtaining karma, something the current system doesn't assist with. It only makes karma something to "brag" about.
or something else that helps rate a comments importance beyond the near-meaningless ordering. Should work within a thread and at the top level equally well.
Comments
Please bring back the comment scores. It helps a lot in parsing the comments and assigning a proportional weight to each when reading them.
I had to think about this a bit, and I disagree so far. I'm finding that I'm not pre-judging comments as much. It's nice to be able to read someone's comment without knowing first that 70 or 80 or 3 other people thought it was worthwhile.
However, it also eliminate the ability for me to reference a comment with a high score with the understanding it's probably more correct. After all, once I read a comment, I want to know if what others think. Comment scores help that. Granted, it's not the only solution. Having some other visual indicator that suggests a comment is of high quality would be good without needing to resort to simply displaying points.
Replies to comments solve the "I want to know what others think" problem. I agree with the previous commenter: having the comment ratings hidden was unusual at first but I definitely do acknowledge that I used to mentally pre-judge a comment based purely on others' responses to it, despite having dealt multiple times with comments that I disagreed with which had higher upvote counts than the ones I felt were better answers.
I disagree. First, disconnect the actual score with something that indicates a high quality comment. You can display something as high quality without showing a score.
Next, a high quality comment need not have comments. Some of the best comments do not need followup. We should also discourage comments that merely parrot the parent and offer no content of their own. This is probably the biggest argument I have against not having any soft of indicator. If a comment is good, it deserves an up vote to indicate quality.
Next, replies still do not solve the scanning problem. For me to deduce the quality comments using replies requires I read through all the comments. Sometimes this is not an issue, but posts with a larger number of comments, this becomes problematic.
Finally, the above also means that replies of comments, and replies of replies, suddenly makes it really difficult what others deem quality content.
At the end of the day, up voting comments is meant to distinguish good, high quality comments from the normal run of the mill comments. If it's not being used for that, then up votes are merely being used as a way to obtain karma. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that by removing karma from showing which posts are of higher quality, it serves no real purpose other than to obtain more karma. I'm more interested in reading quality comments than obtaining karma, something the current system doesn't assist with. It only makes karma something to "brag" about.
or something else that helps rate a comments importance beyond the near-meaningless ordering. Should work within a thread and at the top level equally well.