'PG mentions that people seeing "...their reputation in the eyes of their peers drain away..."' I think part of the lure of karma is simply getting affirmation

'PG mentions that people seeing "...their reputation in the eyes of their peers drain away..."' I think part of the lure of karma is simply getting affirmation that what you are saying is accepted by others. In this case the "others" are not people you know but people you respect in many ways because of the intelligent way they write or some other power they have. Or how they appear at least to be accepted by the group. In a sense it becomes a challenging game to write something striking a balance between sharing some knowledge or opinion and not ticking off others by going to far out of bounds with what you are saying. "quality of Hacker News remain the same without the novelty of individual karma " I don't think it would at this scale. On a smaller scale though it might. There is a wide range of topics and people here. On a smaller site (AVC.com comes to mind with usually 1 idea a day posted) it is a core of users and while there is karma and likes it is far less important than on HN.