How does "score hidden" affect your perception of comments in new or contentious threads?

Score hidden is a moderator-configurable setting that conceals the upvote and downvote counts on comments for a defined period after they are posted. Moderators can set this window to any duration up to 24 hours, though shorter windows of one to a few hours are more common. During this window, the comment score appears as a default value — typically shown as 1 point or simply as a dot — regardless of how many votes it has actually accumulated. The purpose of score hiding is to reduce bandwagon voting. Research on social media platforms, including Reddit's own observations, has shown that early vote patterns strongly influence subsequent voting behavior: a comment that receives early downvotes is more likely to continue accumulating downvotes because new readers use the score as a quality signal before reading the content. Score hiding disrupts this feedback loop by forcing readers to evaluate a comment's content on its merits before the social proof of the vote count is available to prime their judgment. For readers, score-hidden threads require more active engagement. In a normal thread, you can scan comments at a glance and let the vote aggregation do some of the filtering work for you. In a score-hidden thread, determining which comments represent community consensus requires actually reading them — which is arguably closer to the behavior the platform is designed to encourage, but which takes more time and cognitive effort. For commenters, score hiding reduces the real-time feedback loop that can discourage users from posting unpopular-but-correct views. Knowing your score is hidden makes it psychologically easier to post a dissenting or minority view without immediately seeing it plunge into negative territory. Contentious communities — those dealing with polarizing political or social topics — often use score hiding to prevent early vote cascades from silencing certain perspectives before they can be fairly evaluated.