The irony is that karma posts are so easy. Take something most of your audience already agrees with, triple down on some reductionist caricature of it, and smother it in pithy glibness. The shorter the better. Particularly effective if you set up a false dichotomy vis-a-vis the person you're replying to. It's a reflexive style of engagement for many, and HN is not immune to it.

I aim to avoid it these days, with varying degrees of success. I don't need fictitious internet points, I want to hear other people's genuine thoughts on a subject of interest. Or sometimes just to share something I thought was neat.

But since all social media are Pavlovian conditioning for points, you rarely get any fruitful exchange. And it seems to be getting rarer and rarer, sadly.

I wonder how one would structure social media to avoid it. HN is good, but the karma system is a double edged sword. Would it increase the quality of the discussion to retain the use of points for ranking posts, but hide point counts completely? Perhaps they could be represented by words: "Positive response", "negative response", but only past -3 and +3, with no changes in wording beyond that score?