Comment by cperciva
12 years ago
Whether that makes sense depends on the context. Particularly in the case of someone submitting a link to their own (startup|open source code|blog post|etc), people often ask questions along the lines of "what does the author think about X" and the identity of the person replying matters a great deal to whether a reply is meaningful.
It should be obvious whether such an answer sounds authoritative or not, and it sounds like a comment could still be downvoted once endorsed. So I don't think this is as big of a problem as users endorsing (or not endorsing) based on username.
There's also certain commentators who are more authoritative on certain topics, because they are known to have positions at certain companies etc.