Ask HN: Don't show points?

I was thinking about group think and how to keep it out of HN. And I ran into a fundamental problem/cause:

Psychologically, people naturally follow groupthink. No matter how much you stress not following it, they'll still be inclined to follow the herd.

So just saying "try not to follow groupthink" isn't good enough. Instead, why not make it less possible to follow groupthink?

So here's my suggestion: stop displaying the points. Maybe still gray out downvoted comments, but I think even that is unnecessary. They'll float down to the bottom of the thread anyway. And I know that when I see a downvoted thread, I read it differently. I don't say "maybe a couple people just didn't like what they said, and it was actually ok" coming into it, I say "what did this person do wrong? What stupid thing did they say?" I come into it biased because of the points it has.

Same goes for a comment with a lot of points. I say, "what great wisdom does this person have for me?" and thus am naturally more inclined to upvote it or at least like it.

The rankings would still work the same, so the good comments would still float to the top, but there wouldn't be an absolute number to tell you "this is amazing" or "this sucks." High posts might just be very new. Low posts might just have gone unnoticed or been overshadowed by more amazing ones.

I realize that the points serve many positive purposes too, and it's just an idea, but I think if individual, unprejudiced discussions are what we want, eliminating the display of points would help a lot.

Yeah, that would work too. Didn't think of that, but that sorta gets the best of one world and a good part of the other. You still get to see the points eventually, but it doesn't influence the voting.

The reason that you would want to show the score before voting is that HN isn't all about voting and karma. If someone were to just want to read the best answers to a question, they might just scan by score for the highest ones.

Maybe there could be a manual-override for one page. But it would make you be conscious of the fact that you're going to bias yourself by doing it. It would be for people wanting to read but not really vote.

Theoretically, that's the optimal solution. They have advantages for situations like what you listed.

The problem is that pretty much everyone is in some way influenced by them just by seeing them.

Do you really approach a comment at -10 points with the same open mind as one with +30?

I think the more important question is should you? If 10 other people before have expended the mental energy to figure out that this comment isn't worth reading, why should I expend mine to determine the same thing? I like where you're going with this, but it uses our group mental capacity much less efficiently. There is probably a better solution... looking at a number is a pretty efficient filter and I don't think we should lose it.

In most cases you’re probably right. But not always.

The problem is you don’t know the moral character or intelligence level of the people who first stumbled on to a comment. If two ignorant people happen to see a quality comment first and both vote it down that comment is essentially lost to the group. I think we can all agree there are at least a few fools running around here so the idea isn’t farfetched.

So the question is do you want to trust what might be insightful comments to the randomness of timing?