The default amount of Karma for posting or recommending a link shouldn't be added to your 'score' until someone else actually votes it up. Downvotes should cos

The default amount of Karma for posting or recommending a link shouldn't be added to your 'score' until someone else actually votes it up. Downvotes should cost the downvoter karma (perhaps not 1:1). "Me too!" Follow on comments shouldn't get lots of karma. "No, your broad generalization fails in one particular case" follow on comments shouldn't get lots of karma. Sometimes I feel like Hacker News is full of anal retentives, or aspies just waiting to pounce on anyone and massively upvote the most minor 'correction' - even when it turns out that the 'correction' is in fact incorrect. Consider this - theoretically a post by PG could sit at 5 karma, and the reply to that post (from some unknown and unqualified freak from the far ends of cyberspace (such as myself)) could hit hundreds or even thousands of karma. Anyway, given the above, I suggest that in addition to not adding default karma to karma scores (which encourages certain kinds of spammy behaviour) upvotes for replies should be capped to some multiple of the upvotes for the original point. A 2:1 multiplier for the cap would be interesting, particularly in the case of replying to a post that already had negative karma...