I generally support not displaying points on comments. But I did run into a case where it would be useful to have some sort of feedback on a series of comments (even if it's just dots or some other non numerical indicator).
I was reading a recent post on the open-sourcing of some of Greplin's Lucene and Bloom filters code. sigil made a comment asking about performance based on how they implemented prefix matching. Then nostrademons responded[1]. When points were displayed it was trivial to get a consensus of whether the community agreed on the performance assessment or whether it was dubious/questionable. Since points are not visible I can't rely on the consensus of the community to help verify or make a decision. Instead I just have the posts and order of the posts. Which, of course, isn't necessarily bad. But has taken away my ability to use the HN community's consensus as verification.
I was reading a recent post on the open-sourcing of some of Greplin's Lucene and Bloom filters code. sigil made a comment asking about performance based on how they implemented prefix matching. Then nostrademons responded[1]. When points were displayed it was trivial to get a consensus of whether the community agreed on the performance assessment or whether it was dubious/questionable. Since points are not visible I can't rely on the consensus of the community to help verify or make a decision. Instead I just have the posts and order of the posts. Which, of course, isn't necessarily bad. But has taken away my ability to use the HN community's consensus as verification.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444585