>My personal opinion is that it degrades the site tremendously not to be able to skim through a thread and see which comments others have deemed interesting/noteworthy/insightful by upvoting them.
I completely disagree. The crowd is not always right in upvoting, as PG pointed out in his statement of the problem (dumb or useless comments getting massively upvoted).
Relying on comment votes as a heuristic for rapidly scanning and deciding what to read is a good idea. Read for yourself and decide, and if you lack the knowledge to decide then bookmark it for later research if it's important, or move on to something else if not.
Comments
>My personal opinion is that it degrades the site tremendously not to be able to skim through a thread and see which comments others have deemed interesting/noteworthy/insightful by upvoting them.
I completely disagree. The crowd is not always right in upvoting, as PG pointed out in his statement of the problem (dumb or useless comments getting massively upvoted).
Relying on comment votes as a heuristic for rapidly scanning and deciding what to read is a good idea. Read for yourself and decide, and if you lack the knowledge to decide then bookmark it for later research if it's important, or move on to something else if not.