Instead of feeling like you have to labor and lose your karma points to make things right, why not extoll the virtues of the article in the comments, which will

Instead of feeling like you have to labor and lose your karma points to make things right, why not extoll the virtues of the article in the comments, which will cause people to read it. Imagine if this article had these 4 comments about the karma system, and 200 points. People would skip the article because they would feel a few people must have voted it up. On the other hand, when people start a discussion about how good the article is, people will actually read it, and that will cause them to vote it up. I was about to skip the article because all the comments were about YC karma.