Thanks for this great thread, zyfo. Have a good day. Real: Several reasons; 1) A way to get points to go over HN's thresholds. It's quite a good idea if you

Thanks for this great thread, zyfo. Have a good day. Real: Several reasons; 1) A way to get points to go over HN's thresholds. It's quite a good idea if you want to game HN to upvote selfish support/articles and/or downvote undesirable comments/articles. It's more possible to get attention to flagged articles, but risky because moderators will look at the content and strip away flag and the up/down vote powers. 2) Train the spam filter to like those messages. Unlikely, but attempted against email spam filters though (Look up 'unsolicited bizarre nonsense email stories'). 3) People with nothing to say but really feel that they must say something even if it's not contributing. I gather the sentiment is that those people should follow the HN guidelines and spirit because there are those that fear the immature link aggregator plague (Reddit, Digg, etc). There's no help for them otherwise.