Comment by thaumasiotes

> I think this change makes the mistake that people with lots of karma are good contributors.

You're making the related mistake that comments with lots of karma are good comments.

By coincidence, I (at the time of writing) have roughly 1500 karma at 2.2 / comment. Here's a selection of some of my sub-10-karma comments that I happen to like:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7194772 (22)

Weirdly, the intuition I got from going back over these is that I'd probably use a threshold of 8 to divide "popular" comments from "unpopular" ones.

Anyway, I see a clear trend in the 10+ comments: they either openly mock someone, or they take a stand on a contentious political issue (the 22-pointer does both!). My favorite of them all is the 5-pointer, and I dearly hoped that someone would reply to it... but no.

Obviously, I've got plenty of less-worthwhile 1- and 2-point comments to my name. But I'm not at all convinced that someone with 10 average karma per comment is making better comments than someone with an average of two; it seems more likely that they're either demagoguing or just witty, possibly nastily witty.

postscript: average karma of some bright lights:

patio11: 15.2

cperciva: 11.3

tokenadult: 6.1

tptacek: 5.4