Why is the metadata so important to so many people on HN? I don't understand it.
Is it a mechanism to find the best comments in a thread? Is it a visualization issue? Is it ego? Is it a voting mechanism to know what others think is important? I honestly do not know.
How about if there was a glyph or color that denoted the amount of votes,views,etc? I think one of the issues was putting a numeric score on an item encouraged upvoting already popular comments.
May be some intelligent coloring would be a good replacement. I just need something that would tell me what comments are likely to be more informative.
For me, it is visualization issue. I used to be able to skim through the comments much faster. Sometimes there was a comment with tons of votes deeply nested in a thread and I would pay attention to it.