I think of it as the easy way and the hard way to gain karma, but I'm biased as a "commenter" user. In reality, some people work hard to supply HN with interest

I think of it as the easy way and the hard way to gain karma, but I'm biased as a "commenter" user. In reality, some people work hard to supply HN with interesting stories and that's important, but it's pretty easy to have sizeable karma without really ever engaging in conversation. I think the tradeoff there is that the HN submitter crowd are very fast to the draw. I'll often encounter a story elsewhere that I want to hear from HN about, so I'll do a search and find it was submitted 15 minutes ago, or even days ago (and I wonder what RSS fueled craze people must go through to find and post things so fast). Of course, for me those are the best cases, because I can go through and read what people think and reply without having to wait for the uptick. But no karma for the slow.