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After 500 points. At that level you can vote down worthless comments. Beyond that the number means nothing. On the flip side it's been interesting to observe t

After 500 points. At that level you can vote down worthless comments. Beyond that the number means nothing. On the flip side it's been interesting to observe the reservations people have for voting something of interest up. I've posted stories and made comments that generate discussion but receive no votes. It's weird that people obviously read the comment or story, find it interesting enough to generate their own comment, but don't acknowledge that with a vote. Why wouldn't someone vote a comment of interest up if karma has no value? It's an odd part of our human psyche. The unfortunate part is that voting is the sole method a site like this has for identifying the signal through the noise yet a large portion of the community is reluctant to participate.

warmfuzzykitten 14y ago
There may be a simple, mechanical reason. I think there are quite a few people like me, who browse HN by scanning down a number of pages opening interesting subjects into new tabs until a considerable reading debt is built up. Why do I do this? Well, I do it everywhere it's possible, so I don't have to change context and wait for pages to load every few seconds. In addition, if you try to read each article when you encounter it, the HN page will expire before you get to the More button! Consequently, when I read the articles later and find an especially worthy one, I sometimes try to page back in HN and vote it up. Frequently I don't find the story before I lose interest in the process. I could search, but a number of HN linkers have rewritten the title - a practice I know PG doesn't like, but people do it anyway - making search from the original back to HN more difficult. Lame excuses, perhaps, but I'm not likely to change my reading habits.