By looking over the "best" stories and "best comments", I find it interesting to note that very few of these are anywhere near what I'd consider to be the "best

By looking over the "best" stories and "best comments", I find it interesting to note that very few of these are anywhere near what I'd consider to be the "best" of Hacker News. Of course, we shouldn't take high karma to mean "good" any more than we take "popular" to mean good in social contexts, but I think it's telling that pg, amongst most commenters here still conflate the two, and while I'm sure most people here, when pressed, would say that they know this isn't really the best of HN, we see people optimize for high karma all the time, often at the expense of actual good content. It's unfortunate that we're using a rating system that encourages this behavior.