In my opinion, you are doing it wrong. The voting scheme doesn't promote herd mentality, the voting scheme is used to sort the comments on the threads. Now, should you measure yourself by your level of karma? NO. The smartest guys here don't have the greatest karma necessarily, so you shouldn't care either. Say what you have to say, and don't mind the score you are given because of it. Is that being cynical? No: because you'll see that your comments with the biggest score will often be trivial or simply wrong, so if you'd started following the score you'd start posting trivial and wrong stuff. Don't do that. Just say what you have to say, learn with us, teach us, and that's it.