Amusingly, HN used to have an "average karma per comment" measure which I thought was interesting. It doesn't any more.
I'm assumed that was why the karma scores for the top ten users aren't visible - you can karma farm your way to the top ten but after that you're blind: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
Maybe psychologically that helps people think "why bother?"
You can click any of those profiles and see their karma, or some number claiming to be anyway.