The magnitudes of the scores seem different than they might have a year ago, but the directions don't.
I'm all for downvoting a bad troll or uninvited meme/rickroll-speak much lower, but it kind of hurts to see real comments being modded into unreadably gray negatives for disagreement purposes.
Priviledge thresholds have been periodically increased by the management. However, the process (so far) has been manual. Threshold-increase might instead simply be automated with code that also calculates karma-inflation.
HN has the flagging system in place, though, so this might be worth a try. The Achewood community gives you more downvotes ('lames') the more upvotes you've received, though that might encourage groupthink.
Perhaps the comment form should have a self-check note along the lines of: "If your comment is just a witty remark, please don't post it." Good heuristics for self-detection are: short and no substance. Perhaps mods need to nuke bad comments for a while to establish a noticeable standard.
I wonder if there is some way to discourage short comments? I could for example bias the comment sorting algorithm to put longer comments higher among siblings.
The psychology of such a note might help a lot, besides not all recent posters would necessarily know that thoughtless witty comments aren't highly valued here.
http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
under every comment box for the first day of a new user's account.
Maybe I should add an additional confirmation step for short comments.
I hardly ever read EULA's (which this in some ways is), and I'm probably not alone in this behaviour.
I have (almost) never experienced a comment that was an obvious digg-user unwittingly passing by, but many comments from new users that want to join the conversation but haven't been here long enough to get a feel for the unwritten rules, and thus post comments that may not go well with the rest of the community.
These users will definitely be helped by a small reminder that they should contribute in a meaningful way. The challenge, as you hint at, is of course what this reminder should be.
Maybe something short and witty like "Remember: if it isn't worht reading it isn't worth posting"
Most people think everything they have to say is worth posting. I'd rather something specifically aimed at short comments, as mentioned above. Something harsh aimed at something under, say, 100 characters, and a brief little reminder towards something under 100 words?
Auto-collapsing threads for comments that are below a certain karma threshold seems like a nice tool as well - it still allows access if you want to parse the thread, and trolls still have a place to do trollish things, but it moves the behavior into an opt-in situation where you have to actually click on the thread in order to see it.
My appreciation of them is like a bell curve, with the optimum ratio of wit[1]/serious comment probably about 1:20. Higher than that, and it starts to get a bit like reddit. Lower and it's taking itself a bit too seriously.
[1] This completely excludes bad puns, memes etc. They have no place here.
Edit: replaced the asterisk after wit with a [1]. Anyone know how to escape an * that's not preceded by whitespace?
In fact, if you could mix the jokes with the information density in just the right way, I think that would be a hugely popular site. People like laughing, and they like having jokes to share with the other hackers during the day.