Submitting links also deeply skews the karma curve compared to regular commenting. A good submission that hits and gets to the top of the front page and stays

Submitting links also deeply skews the karma curve compared to regular commenting. A good submission that hits and gets to the top of the front page and stays there for a while can easily garner a few hundred internet points, and there is no risk of getting brigaded for an unpopular opinion. Even with points on submissions getting debuffed what seems like n/2 or something close to that (in any case it does not seem to be a one-to-one correspondence between the submission's point total and the increase to the submitter's score), submitting stories raises far more points than grinding in the comments. As this brief discussion of the HN metagame shows, anything that gets a number stuck next to it will attract people to optimizing it like flies to a manure pile...