It's great that you can up vote the best comments on HN. But the replies to that comment are then disproportionately highlighted. Often there is a great comment which has been voted to the top, but then there is a whole bunch of replies arguing minor points which are far less worthy of that real estate up the top than the 2nd and 3rd most up voted comments etc.<p>This is especially pronounced on the submissions with the most comments. It is almost impossible to navigate through all the comments and find the best. Obviously replies need to be nested and we can't simply list the most up voted comments to the least without any context, but a simple comment vote count would allow you to very quickly assess a comment's value as seen by the community and move through large threads. Why doesn't HN have this or some other solution?
You can see the vote count for your own comments. However it is probably true to say that the standard of comment debate has improved now that scores are no longer shown - it has also (in my judgement) reduced the incidence of down-voting comments that people disagree with rather than those which are off topic, offensive, or otherwise not helpful.