[politician]

The haves and have nots in the HN karma game is precisely the set of people who submit stories and the set of people who merely leave comments. A mediocre story submission trumps a great comment.

So, you have to consider that when talking about downvotes being discouraging— for people that don’t submit stories it can feel very real.

[matheusmoreira]

My karma is almost entirely from comments. Karma is a function of time and participation. If you comment a lot, you'll get points because chances are someone somewhere will like what you said.

I care a lot more about the names of people than internet points. I've commented on threads here only to realize days later I was interacting with the creator of a major programming language. Some people are interesting enough that I've bookmarked their comments page.