While I do share your sentiment fearing that the community will change, I don't think that the karma totals are really a good gauge of content/comment quality o

While I do share your sentiment fearing that the community will change, I don't think that the karma totals are really a good gauge of content/comment quality on HN. Just because more people are here to upvote does not mean the comment is of lesser quality than before (the opposite is also true...) A quick fix to this could be a sort of weighted comment score. Maybe the karma points / by the number of karma points added that day to give an idea of scale in comparison to the overall size of community. I'm sure others could come up with something more precise, but it's a start.