and to preserve your "orangeness", you might as well fire off smartass comments as they occur to you even if they don't contribute to the conversation. it's the HN equivalent of rewarding thats-what-she-said jokes, and it'll just be a different kind of karma whoring.

slashdot got this particular issue right (at least in the early 2000s, before their digg-envy took hold) by not awarding karma for anything modded up "Funny". while these "funny" comments -- usually brief and snarky or perverted -- would still appear +5, there was otherwise no long-term incentive. unfortunately there's no analogous control mechanism here (and copping slashdot's mod system altogether seems too heavyweight.)

there was also a karma cap (+50?) above which your comments would start out at 2 points instead of 1; otherwise there's little point in accumulating more karma than that.

their moderation faq is worth a read (skip about a third of the way down to "will you delete my comment?"): http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml

also, some winding threads are really interesting (and vacuous ones are easy to skip) -- i don't know if it's worth the tradeoff to cull them.

(yes, i'm replying to the top-modded post so my comment goes above the fold.)