I do not think this is a fair characterization. Lots of valuable comments don't get a lot of votes. Giving feedback on a less popular "Show HN" is a good examp

I do not think this is a fair characterization. Lots of valuable comments don't get a lot of votes. Giving feedback on a less popular "Show HN" is a good example. In most cases, you'll just get one vote, from the person who posted the story. Sometimes they don't even bother giving a vote, so you'll get nothing. If they ask a follow-up question and you reply, you probably won't get any votes at all because your comment won't be generally useful, just useful to the person with the question. For example, this series of comments, for which I received not a single vote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8009176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8009176 It also goes the other way... here's a comment where I received 13 points for doing arithmetic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7720950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7720950 (Actually, I didn't even do the arithmetic, Wolfram Alpha did.)