Regardless of personality or politics, most can rightly agree that things like "Fancy Euclid's “Elements” in TeX" or "Text rendering using multi channel signed distance fields" are noteworthy accomplishments.
What some asshole thinks about those things, and what a bunch of other assholes think about his thinking, are neither here nor there--this comment included.
But how does it make sense to give 400 points to a submitter out of 5 who posted the same thing ? And often to an article which may not be neither the first, nor the best about the issue. That's what I mean by entirely random.
Furthermore, without threads and comments HN would just be another link aggregator from some relatively fixed sources.
And you prove my point about comments mentioning a-holes, in that useless ones would be downvoted while useful or informative ones would be upvoted, and quite rightly bestow karma and benefits to contributors deserving it. That would make sense. You wouldn't see actual a-holes, they'd be downvoted to oblivion.
Maybe if HN consistently registered the first submitted link and marked all others as dupes automatically. Even so, still seems a flawed reward system.
I upvote every submission of the same article that I find interesting
Still wrong in my view, and worth giving more value to comments. I've already commented anyway, not sure why HN does not automatically register the first time a link is submitted and redirect the rest to the first one.
Some commenters are experts in their field, and their comments are worth reading. For example, I've learned more about security by reading tptacek's comments than I have by reading articles on security.