I know 1500 people have said this before, but today I guess I'm the one who hit the boiling point.
The value of HN, from the perspective of simply learning, has been destroyed for me since upvotes were hidden.
When I first started reading HN I learned a TON very quickly and everyday about completely new stuff, and was able to do so because I could easily sort through the legitimacy of opinions based on their upvotes. Yes, the upvote system wasn't perfect, but it's a piece of information I can take with a grain of salt. Especially as an engineer who knows little about business, it was extremely helpful to get a community perspective on the startup stuff.
Now, unless I know a lot about the subject (in which case I get limited value from the community), this is just a forum with no easy way for readers to differentiate the noise except for: a) the location on the page, which is useless when comparing a parent to a child reply, and b) the overall confidence and aggressiveness of the poster, which is the exact thing we are trying to avoid judging legitimacy on.
I feel like I just come back here everyday because of inertia and habit. That wont last much longer because I don't feel like I learn anything here: it's just watching people argue now.
I expect massive downvoting but hopefully I'm not the only one...