Amongst other reasons, you only see someone's karma if you go specifically looking for it, and the old-style average score per post has been withdrawn anyway,

Amongst other reasons, you only see someone's karma if you go specifically looking for it, and the old-style average score per post has been withdrawn anyway, so there's no way of knowing if someone's really good, or just hangs around all day every day saying things. So unless it happens to be a commenter a reader has seen before and recalls the quality of their comments, a reader has no groupthink preconception about how valuable this line of text is. I suspect this significantly improves the odds of evaluating it on its own merits. I'd like to see karma vanish entirely from everyone's view and be only a hellbanning/moderation assistant, but to be honest most of the benefit came with removing the average post score.