I was reading your comment and thinking about what it would like in practice, when it occurred to me that the gray -> green system is functionally identical to

I was reading your comment and thinking about what it would like in practice, when it occurred to me that the gray -> green system is functionally identical to a horizontal bar graph that goes from 0 to 100%. You could even make the percentage visible, if you wanted to make it explicitly obvious that the purpose of the commenting system is to create comments that score a minimum number of karma. Would that actually be better? Heck if I know. It'd certainly make grinding to 600 karma, so you can downvote people you disagree with, harder.[1] 1: Just kidding! Also, vi is better than emacs, and freebsd is quantifiably superior to linux.