Numbers going up make a certain % of the population behave in strange ways. Some people will go to any lengths to make their imaginary number go up, from asking

Numbers going up make a certain % of the population behave in strange ways. Some people will go to any lengths to make their imaginary number go up, from asking friends to upvote things (potentially worth $$ if a post for a product hits the HN home page) to writing bot rings to upvote their own posts. Another POV is that the entire point of a karma system is to encourage posters to follow the cultural norms on a site. When I first joined HN, posts that weren't at least a few long paragraphs got almost instantly downvoted. I actually appreciated this as it made for a really nice S/N ratio. It also meant that I didn't post any comments unless I had something substantive to say. So basically the karma system encouraged people to change their behavior in such a way as to contribute to conversations in a non-trivial fashion. Now days I feel that downvotes are used to just penalize super toxic comments. Exceptions do exist, but since the maximum down vote is -4, it is pretty easy for the community to restore the score of a comment that got downvoted to grey because it irritated a few people.