from this users inspection things don't.

- I spend substantially more time wading through comments because I can't pick out the good ones. This is particularly true of nested threads.

- I often vote based on the current score. If the score is as the comment deserves (in my opinion) I leave it, otherwise I upvote. I rarely downvote.

- I can't pick out whether a comment is valid (based on scores, and thus the opinion of other users). For instance if a user writes in a comment that joshua schachter never invests in B2B startups I don't know how valid it is.

- When someone responds to a comment I like to see the votes. This is particularly useful when someone disagres with me - if the response gets a lot of upvotes I can be fairly certain I'm wrong. If I don't see the votes I won't know.

Besides, if we don't see scores they're not much good to users. My bet is that over time people will vote less, since they don't immediately see their impact anyway.

I'm wasting a lot more time figuring out the comments than before. The points would guide you to the really important ones (factual corrections, context, valid rebuttals), now I have to skim everything and can't tell whether there's a consensus or not.

Is the average number of comment upvotes per day the same? Would that prove that people don't care about how many upvotes a comment has when they vote?

Or how about the distribution of upvotes over comments under one post -- are upvotes more uniformly distributed?

Do the comments on the bestcomments list have greater or fewer upvotes on an average?

Do you have thoughts on some automated algorithms enterprising folk could implement?

What about average time spent on site?