That's part of what the ratings are meant to do. Sometimes people just want to say "I disagree", or "me too!" - and when the number of participants grows large, it's better for the sake of the conversation if that's expressed in aggregate via the rating.
Similarly, you say hiding comments "doesn't really make sense", but that depends on what you want to get out of the comments. If you want to read every single comment all the time, by all means, register an account and disable rating-based comment visibility. It's entirely optional. Pages will even load faster!
But most readers are just dropping by, and for them, I believe a filter helps to give them more of the good stuff "at a glance", especially after a few days of discussion and resulting evaluation - both from regulars and others.
We could do even better there, by highlighting "the best" comments up top, but that requires a bit more thought.
That's part of what the ratings are meant to do. Sometimes people just want to say "I disagree", or "me too!" - and when the number of participants grows large, it's better for the sake of the conversation if that's expressed in aggregate via the rating.
Similarly, you say hiding comments "doesn't really make sense", but that depends on what you want to get out of the comments. If you want to read every single comment all the time, by all means, register an account and disable rating-based comment visibility. It's entirely optional. Pages will even load faster!
But most readers are just dropping by, and for them, I believe a filter helps to give them more of the good stuff "at a glance", especially after a few days of discussion and resulting evaluation - both from regulars and others.
We could do even better there, by highlighting "the best" comments up top, but that requires a bit more thought.