We had publicly visible comment scores, years ago. They generated flame wars: people would compare their scores to the scores of other comments, feel outrage, and start meta-discussions about the scores.
Even today, if you follow 'dang and 'sctb (whose comments are the informal moderator log of HN), you'll see a significant chunk of their work is just reminding people not to go on and on about being downvoted.
I don't think public comment scores are coming back and I think the quality of discussion is improved without them. There's an interesting phenomenon here about the quality of discussion versus the convenience of consuming comments; it may be that the site is better for participants without the scores, but better for consumers with them.
I have fewer opinions about the first two suggestions. But it's worth keeping in mind that HN has some design limitations that also serve as brakes on runaway discussions. For instance: after a day or two, it's hard to hold on to a back-and-forth debate, because the threads aren't especially easy to find. Notice how HN has no feature to alert you to someone having responded to your comment. Reddit has that, and it's a disaster; it's like the badge on Slack that psychologically coerces you to read chat room messages you don't really care about, except on Reddit there's also an implied demand that you write a new comment to respond. Yech.
I often want to see the newest comments on a thread (I find myself CMD-F searching for "minutes ago"), but I worry that making it trivially easy to do would have similar effects, of encouraging people to monitor threads waiting for comments to jump on. I have to force myself not to do that sometimes on threads where I have a lot of opinions about the subject.
Even today, if you follow 'dang and 'sctb (whose comments are the informal moderator log of HN), you'll see a significant chunk of their work is just reminding people not to go on and on about being downvoted.
I don't think public comment scores are coming back and I think the quality of discussion is improved without them. There's an interesting phenomenon here about the quality of discussion versus the convenience of consuming comments; it may be that the site is better for participants without the scores, but better for consumers with them.
I have fewer opinions about the first two suggestions. But it's worth keeping in mind that HN has some design limitations that also serve as brakes on runaway discussions. For instance: after a day or two, it's hard to hold on to a back-and-forth debate, because the threads aren't especially easy to find. Notice how HN has no feature to alert you to someone having responded to your comment. Reddit has that, and it's a disaster; it's like the badge on Slack that psychologically coerces you to read chat room messages you don't really care about, except on Reddit there's also an implied demand that you write a new comment to respond. Yech.
I often want to see the newest comments on a thread (I find myself CMD-F searching for "minutes ago"), but I worry that making it trivially easy to do would have similar effects, of encouraging people to monitor threads waiting for comments to jump on. I have to force myself not to do that sometimes on threads where I have a lot of opinions about the subject.
So just some thoughts.