So there are solutions but understand this was done by design. The HN creators fee that back and forth comments can rapidly degrade into a war or words. This appears to be very true if you look at Reddit.
Initially I hated this, now I love it
Initially I hated this, now I love it
Recently I've even been considering using a client stylesheet to hide my karma at the top of the page.
Internally, for me it's nice to make a distinction between when I a writing for others and when I am writing for myself.
If I am writing for myself, which I often do, it's much like my musical busking practice: I am not doing it for the money or attention, but just because it adds a nice public layer where I feel like I should respect at least some social norms. That addition of a lightweight ruleset feels helpful to me: instead of just eliding over the parts of my thoughts that might not make sense to other people, I am forced to at least notate them in some way.
If I am writing for other people, then it's nice to know how something was received; I really am often curious about what others think.
Getting feedback in this fashion has led me to shut up when I have an unpopular opinion, but even that's a really good thing to know.
It has been helpful to see the couple of points where I wasn't sure how my opinions would be taken, and to then either be taken to task for writing unclearly, find a real problem in my own thinking, or to at least have a chance to gather the wrong-headed arguments people may fall into when confronted with some of my thoughts.
And if I am indeed writing for other people and no one is upvoting, than that's good to know as well-- there is literally no point for me to write something for other people which is completely ignored. That's a good indicator about when I am just writing for myself-- which is almost everything I write and then publish as a comment on HN.
So, to answer the OP, I just check my comments and if there is a response in the top couple I may respond back. But if folks are writing replies to my very old comments I, I am not checking those because I'm guessing they are just writing for themselves.
Anything matching the opinion of some echo-chamber can get hundreds of points (be it purely factual, opinion or even being devoid of content). Mildly unpopular opinions, aka "hot takes", the cathartic stuff, can also garner a lot more upvotes. However, curious civil discussion or sourced posts clarifying something non-controversial won't get much attention at all. Because it's boring. Maybe that's alright, though.
The only part where I see karma working as feedback is in possible flame wars. Anything controversial will get lots of downvotes. So it accidentally work as a deterrent I guess.
I've often posted questions, gotten good replies I wanted to follow up on, but didn't realize until weeks later when the thread was stale. I usually take discussions to message boards with basic UX like content notifications.
Alternatively, you can use the second menu item "Threads" for an easy overview over all your comment threads including replies to your comments.
This also has the advantage over notifications that you decide when to look at the discussion, instead of waiting for notifications (immediate discussion thread notifications - a great evil of our time).
I can already do that on sites that have basic discussion features, by turning those features off and opening a bunch of tabs.
I don't understand how you missed the point after I even repeated it in the last paragraph (of just three).
Also, nobody forces or even just asked you to do what others do.
Was strange at first to me too but makes a lot of sense and I appreciate HN not consuming more of my time and adversely impacting my mental health because of it.
They want you to keep track of your karma and get positive dopamine hit with the upvote alerts.
These sites are like drugs. I am surprised why there is not much talk about this.
I'm embarrassed to admit the number of times I was about to go off half-cocked because I hadn't taken the time to carefully read a comment and/or to just calm down.