I think karma mechanisms have had a net negative effect on online discussion. I don't want to have preconceived notion on how I should feel about a post - I want to make my own decisions. There's no escaping it now though, which is sad.
Tying a system for surfacing high quality content to individual points seems like a recipe for disaster. I like facebooks system, where points and algorithms work together to try and surface content that users will like, but there is no actual running point system to try and game.
My key objection is that what the majority of users think is "better/relevant" should have no influence on what I think is better and relevant. I can decide for myself, I don't need the 'hivemind'.
What's wrong with just a "deleting memes" policy?
At the end of the day, I'm not happy to follow the collective judgment of other users.
For example, with sufficient data to analyse, it shouldn't be tremendously difficult to find relationships between users who tend to agree or disagree, and provide each user with a customised view, taking these preferences into account.
(Of course, slashdot took a slant at making it cleverer - by allowing upvoting for different reasons - e.g. funny vs. insightful.)
I much preferred online discussion pre-karma.
It would be nice if HN would allow sorting of threads by various filters, such as time of last reply, and/or decide whether or not low-sorted comments get greyed out.
Except now you have to deal with two definitions of quality - what you want to read and what gets voted up, and those don't always correlate.
Then don't! Or, if you mean you don't want to know how anyone else felt about a post, and you use the Stylish browser extension, you can use this style I made which makes all comment text the same vivid #000000 --
https://userstyles.org/styles/141705/that-s-just-like-your-o...
I'm not saying that their ideas aren't worthwhile, but simply that the medium won't allow for those ideas to be presented in an engaging manner.
There's a huge difference between the wall-of-text full of typos and misspellings (which seem to become the weapon of choice of native speakers as well), and the misuse of pronouns, or forgetting which word is an irregular preterit. I, for one, would be in favour of seeing the former ranked lower.