Ask HN: Hide karma everywhere?
It seems like scores used to serve three purposes. 1. Rank comments / submissions; 2. provide feedback; 3. provide a mild incentive to post.
1. You don't need to see the score for points to serve this purpose. You might argue that this is not working anymore anyway, but that should be another discussion.
2. Since you can't see other people's points anymore, the positive reinforcement is already gone, as you have nothing to compare yourself to (are 5 points on a comment great or merely average?), and the negative reinforcement could be replaced by some other metric (display avg. number of comments with a score less than one).
3. This might have worked well when you had a small number of people who made relatively good comments anyway, but as more and more people join, you will also tend to get more people who care too much about internet cred and who are in it only to watch their karma go up. Of course I'm sure there are people who make great comments "for the karma". Still, I would guess that people who care more about karma are more likely to be people who make sub par comments.
As active moderation doesn't seem to be in the cards, it's all about creating an environment that encourages good quality comments and commenters and / or discourages bad quality comments and commenters. Removing the karma game completely could be a step in the right direction in that respect.