The strong tendency to downvote ad-hominen / abusive comments on HN has really improved my ability to write comments that are informative and non-inflammatory.

The strong tendency to downvote ad-hominen / abusive comments on HN has really improved my ability to write comments that are informative and non-inflammatory. That's the good news. The bad news is that the comments that I make that get lots of votes tend to be on bike-shedding topics - things that everyone has an opinion on, such as sexual harrassment in the community, or military toys, or HN meta-discussions. Posts that I consider authoritive (and there are _some_ subjects on which I can talk authoritively!) rarely get many points, typically just 3 or 4. In my opinion, it is this tendency that drives the reddit-isation of social news sites. So, how can we keep the good effects of points (keeping the tone polite), and get rid of the bike-shedding? Well, personally I think it would be good if you got a point for each comment/subcomment made off of your comment. Comments can be flagged with a category:inflammatory/abusive/off-topic. Each flag loses you a point. Points are only visible to the author of a comment. Flag categories are tracked separately so that the author of a comment can see if they are getting flagged for being off-topic, or poor tone, or whatever. I would like to be able to say that we shouldn't care about points, but they really have helped me in making my posts more informative and less inflammatory, so I think they do have some benefit. It's just that the current system has some negative unintended consequences...