Title: I was thinking about group think and how to keep it out of HN. And I ran into a fundamental problem/cause:<p>Psychologically, people naturally follow groupthink. No matter how much you stress not following it, they'll still be inclined to follow the herd.<p>So just saying "try not to follow groupthink" isn't good enough. Instead, why not make it less possible to follow groupthink?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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