I know I'll be out of step with most who comment on HN but I question the necessity of having a ranking/voting system at all. All it seems to do is to act as an ego booter for commentators and it messes up orderly discussion when people insist on posting replies to the first commentator.

As a news aggregator, no doubt HN needs some method of ranking stories to set their listing lifetimes and their importance (page ranking) but that could be accomplished by the number of clicks a storey receives and or how long a visitor/commentator stays on a story (or the time between link clicks).

I also question aspects of the voting system as currently implemented. It's not unusual for me to receive down-votes on comments to controversial stores but not receive a comment from the down-voter. Why bother with this system if the voter hasn't the gumption to say why he/she disagrees with one's views? (One could discuss the psychology and social philosophy behind this but here is not the place).

Another annoyingly aspect of the voting system is the lack of stats. The time I take from posting to checking to see if someone has replied varies wildly—from minutes to days to never. This wide variation is significant when I post to controversial stores. Days later I can check back to see if there's been any votes or replies only to find there has been none.

At other times, I've monitored the incoming votes almost in realtime and watched them oscillate around 0 or 1, that is I've received many up and down votes but the long-term average is zero. Come back and check days later and one hasn't a clue from the stats if anyone at all has actually read one's comment let alone the fact that it was equally controversial to both sides of a polarized audience. HN should allow users access to these long-term stats.