Don't show points?
almost: I think this is a very good idea, but for a slightly different reason.
The whole points-for-posts thing creates a meta-game of accumulating
points above the normal game of participating in discussion. This
leads to those annoying meta-disucssions where people complain about
being down modded and all that goes with that.The modding system is useful for ranking comments so that when I read
a massive thread the most interesting ones tend to be around the top.It may also be useful for users as a feedback mechanism to figure out
when they're doing something that's not cool (like the things we've
been discussing in the guidelines thread today) but I don't think you
need a precise numerical score for that. And I think it's the precise
score that gets people in the karma-game mindset. It certainly does
that for me.