Comment by borski
4 hours ago
You acquire karma through posting things that are interesting or curious enough that others upvote them.
Thus, you build reputation by acquiring karma.
It isn’t perfect, but the fact that folks with higher karma can “fix” the emotional flags of folks with lower karma, it helps.
Also, I’d recommend re-reading the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
All that does is reinforce the existing biases. If you post a lot of things other HN users agree with, you get the ability to silence things HN users don't like.
Almost all of my karma is from a single post link that blew up randomly. I think this is the case for most users' karma here.
You just explained the mechanism by which the karma number goes up, not explained your theory why you think higher number means less emotional voting.