I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count

I know 1500 people have said this before, but today I guess I'm the one who hit the boiling point.

The value of HN, from the perspective of simply learning, has been destroyed for me since upvotes were hidden.

When I first started reading HN I learned a TON very quickly and everyday about completely new stuff, and was able to do so because I could easily sort through the legitimacy of opinions based on their upvotes. Yes, the upvote system wasn't perfect, but it's a piece of information I can take with a grain of salt. Especially as an engineer who knows little about business, it was extremely helpful to get a community perspective on the startup stuff.

Now, unless I know a lot about the subject (in which case I get limited value from the community), this is just a forum with no easy way for readers to differentiate the noise except for: a) the location on the page, which is useless when comparing a parent to a child reply, and b) the overall confidence and aggressiveness of the poster, which is the exact thing we are trying to avoid judging legitimacy on.

I feel like I just come back here everyday because of inertia and habit. That wont last much longer because I don't feel like I learn anything here: it's just watching people argue now.

I expect massive downvoting but hopefully I'm not the only one...

You need to ween yourself off your social proof addiction. The problem with vote counts is that two downvotes can start a cascade of reflex downvotes. Or at best, it won't get upvoted. When vote counts where active, this effect caused many instances where an excellent comment was found greyed out at the bottom of the page until a few smart HN folks with high karma voted it back up.

Sure - to be clear I'm not tied to upvotes as a number specifically, and I doubt anyone else is. But give us SOMETHING.

That is absolutely a fault in any social proof system. As I mentioned, upvotes need to be taken with a grain of salt.

I still hold they are far superior to nothing.

Edit: case in point: I'd REALLY like to know how many people upvoted mmaunders original comment.

I know I'm not really supposed to have an opinion on these things, being a recently-created account and all, but I must respectfully disagree. If you really want to learn, using upvotes as proxy for correctness is a suboptimal way to do so, especially regarding topics without any clear cut answers. Being new to this site, I've actually spent roughly equal amounts of time with and without vote counts an I've noticed a pretty big difference in my own habits. In particular, rather than acting like HN is an omniscient font of knowledge, I treat it much more like wikipedia: a springboard for further exploration of topics.