Ask HN: What does karma signify?

I just wrote a short comment[1] that took a minute to post, while earlier I had written a long analysis[2] that had required some thought. In my opinion, the first one won me more karma than I deserved and the second one did receive not any attention as I would have liked (not necessarily karma, but rather comments). The big difference is that one was a random comment that contributed hardly anything important to the discussion, while the other contributed to the original post (even if people disagreed with me). Shouldn't people prefer relevance and new ideas over irrelevance and no new ideas? Karma should signify that that the comment contributed to the discussion, or offered a new and still relevant, thought-provking conversation. This is obviously just my opinion, so I'm interested in what your opinions are on the topic. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060920 [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060542