[sillysaurus]

It's kind of mindblowing how trafficked the front page of HN is.

HN is, basically, its front page. HN gets 100k uniques a day.

I was once at an outdoor concert along with 50k others. I remember looking around and being amazed at the sheer size of the crowd. If you've never been at an event that large, it's hard to get a feeling for just how many people 50,000 people really is. You have to imagine all of the people you've ever directly interacted with in your entire life, then somehow mentally multiply them by about 30x, then gather them all into the same field, watching the same concert stage.

HN is exactly that, except twice as big, and everyone can jump on stage at any time and speak to the entire crowd of 100k other people. Seriously, a tenth of a million!

It seems inevitable, then, that since writing a quality comment involves a lot of effort, most people who want to say something will default to the relatively effortless game of intellectual whack-a-mole against perceived flaws in other people's work. I'm sure it gives some people comfort that other people agree with them, and nothing unites people like a common enemy. So the karma counter may have inadvertently become the fuel for the middlebrow dismissals plaguing HN.