Actually I've thought the quality of comments has improved since points went away.
With too much gamification, everything becomes a game. Writing a comment should be about sharing experience or insight, not making a move to try to score points.
With too much gamification, everything becomes a game. Writing a comment should be about sharing experience or insight, not making a move to try to score points.
Taking away only other people's points isn't really solving the problem.
With the old system, I often found myself motivated to post b/c I saw that a snarky comment had gotten a lot of points and wanted to one-up it. It was an ugly, ugly emotion and thankfully PG has eradicated it from HN.
Not as long as total karma scores remain visible to the world.