I think one compromise could be to remove this restriction from users with > x karma. It's not ideal to me but it is something ...
If anything, I think the stories are the problem. Cool hacks and interesting science often fail to get the 2-3 upvotes they need to escape the new page. On page 2 of "New", I've found the following fairly decent stories that died recently: http://simplystatistics.org/2014/03/20/the-8020-rule-of-stat... http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/cassandra-...
Yet both of these are vastly more useful than Julie Horvath's "omfg, I had a workplace conflict" or "Yay basic income, no facts, no reasoning, yay" (currently 380 pts, 441 comments, was #1 for a while today).
I'd suggest that it's far more important to improve the stories than to improve the comments. The comments on a story like "JDK 8 Release Notes" or "Circuit Breaker" (about a distributed computing design pattern) are actually quite good.
First, On 'developing statistical methods' the average HNer has more insightful things to say than the average person. On alternatives to social welfare the average HN commenter is not much more insightful than the average person. The only reason to do it here is because here is the community where they discuss things online.
Second some articles contributes no more than just the topic ("Yay basic income, no facts, no reasoning, yay"). HN isn't for that so it fails. It works for discussing articles or specific facts and news items, not for discussing 'topics.^' ATM it looks like there are 2-3 of these on page one.
^BTW, is there any software specifically designed to allow discussion of these "forever topics." IE, the topics that keeps popping up in every forum and get pinned in the traditional BB forums?
Every other story has mean, uninformed, badly-written, unproductive comments
I also agree that the stories are the bigger problem.
Given that karma is a function of votes from articles posted as well as net votes from comments made, is there a way to use the second but not the first for karma limits related to comments?