I'm conflicted. As a (heavy) consumer of HN, not having the best comments called out to me has made it more difficult to parse, and not being able to sort searchyc results by points will eventually diminish its value as external memory for me.
As a producer on HN, I have noticed two things: one, the subjective self-assessed quality of the comments I have been writing since the change has been far higher than it was in the few months prior to the change. I've been quipping less and writing meatier, substantive, useful things (I hadn't stopped writing those, but there were periods of weeks where I had no comment longer than a paragraph and very few actionable bits in those comments). I do not know why this is -- it could be phases of the moon, totally unrelated to the interface change, for all I know.
I also note that my per-comment scores for meaty comments are higher than they've ever been, which may or may not be desirable. I don't care about karma, but to the extent anyone else cares about their karma relative to folks on the leaderboard, my anecdotal single-point observation is that winners seem to be winning at the moment.
I guess the effect here is that some people may be voting to what they think the comment is worth. So if you already have 50 point for a comment they would be thinking yeah that seems about right for the content provided in that comment I'll leave it without voting. Whereas without the points this effect goes away and the same person is likely to up vote you.
Not that I have spent a great deal of time reading comments since the change but I think I may be voting less, I guess there might be an effect there where subconsciously I am less likely to vote because I don't know what kind of an impact the vote is going to make.
Also with a thread like this one with so many comments, the votes can help guide you in what are the key takeaways without having to read the whole thing. In the same way the high voted items can give you some of the best stuff without having to spend hours trawling through many items. I guess in that way the changes effect those that want to get a quick hacker news fix around other activities more than someone who has a few hours to really go in depth on topics.
Points could also go into an invisible field, for the benefit of search engines. Then those hell-bent on seeing people's points could have their greasemonkey script.
I think part of the explanation is that now people are focusing more on the usernames they recognize instead of the points that the comment already has.
Patrick, I have the same reactions. The points are good for parsing, but they are also good discipline in posting comments. Something that ultimately gets 1 point was probably was not worth posting anyway. Something that was downvoted was probably poorly worded to begin with. (Also you guys have a poor appreciation of Maine humor. Unfortunately my GF and my kids agree with you.) What surprises me is that you like anecdotes from decades past in SV.
Bottom line: keep the points so that some of us become a little bit better in our writing.
As a producer on HN, I have noticed two things: one, the subjective self-assessed quality of the comments I have been writing since the change has been far higher than it was in the few months prior to the change. I've been quipping less and writing meatier, substantive, useful things (I hadn't stopped writing those, but there were periods of weeks where I had no comment longer than a paragraph and very few actionable bits in those comments). I do not know why this is -- it could be phases of the moon, totally unrelated to the interface change, for all I know.
I also note that my per-comment scores for meaty comments are higher than they've ever been, which may or may not be desirable. I don't care about karma, but to the extent anyone else cares about their karma relative to folks on the leaderboard, my anecdotal single-point observation is that winners seem to be winning at the moment.