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pg

Ok, now everyone's comment avg is visible in their profile.

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This discourages people from posting helpful comments that aren't likely to get many upvotes. For example,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1741408

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1485254

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1349459

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1349455

Those are all comments by me that were helpful to the parent, but which are "punished" by the public display of avg.

More is not necessarily better though is it?

"More is better" is implicit. If the number has no meaning, then why calculate and display it?

I don't get that more is implicitly better. It is pretty clear from a naive glance at the list of leaders that there are diverse average points that correlate to diverse posting styles.

If you want it scaled to fit a continuum of "bigger is always implicitly better", a more reasonable number would be: average of (comment points/parent points)

Even if a number has no [absolute cardinal, > x] meaning, there is still a nominal information value to the datum.

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