Long comments take a much larger investment. If you consider karma/word, short comments are the way to go.

10% is a fairly significant number, when all is said and done. Meaning, 10% of all highlighted users could essentially just be good at making witty one line comments.

That being said, 90%/10% is a fantastic signal to noise ratio when compared to the rest of the internet. :-)

Right, but it shouldn't matter what the makeup of the top 30 comments are. In this case, it only matters that someone can net a 3.5 average over their last 50. Which maybe isn't statistically probable for users who happen to write the occasional popular but low-value comment.

Either way, I would argue that while the upper bound on exacerbation isn't high, the same is true of any potential mitigation. At the end of the day, I don't see the major problems subsiding much, and it's not just one-line zingers, but, say, uncharitable comments that piss people off and provoke deep threads of people talking past each other. There's nothing more unpleasant in online communities than being the recipient of an uncharitable reply, and feeling compelled to defend oneself. (I say this being guilty of uncharitable replies myself.)