What do you gain knowing the karma and age of a user when you're replying its comment or thread?
Are you going to base your disertation at "argumentum ad hominem"?
No to the subjetivism
Are you going to base your disertation at "argumentum ad hominem"?
No to the subjetivism
The comments on HN already display the user name. Tell me, would you honestly discern a comment from pg the same as you would for some other unknown user?
But perhaps others are more fan-worshipping.
When you're making an argument or counterpoint, you would do well to divorce your argument from the external characteristics of whoever you're responding to. However, when you are just reading through conversations for your own benefit there is a lot you can gain from the added context of the user's reputation.
For example, whenever there is an article about security and I stumble upon a comment written by tptacek, I can safely assume that he knows what he's talking about and I can therefore place more trust in his comment than I would in a comment from someone I don't know. This context is particularly useful to me when I have a hard time judging the value of the comments alone simply because I know jack squat about security.
Similarly, if I stumble across a comment that makes a radically strange conclusion (like "women and men should be lumped into one sports category") and I look at who wrote it, I can remember that the commenter has made some very good points in the past and is not prone to making dumb arguments. From there I can cut a little more slack in my own mind for the argument and I can try to reach into it and see what the main point he's trying to get across is.
None of these approaches is fan-worshiping, nor do they involve me making an ad hominem argument. Context is absolutely useful for humans. We are inherently biased creatures for a reason. We have to make quick judgments and take shortcuts every day to deal with all of the information, and the context of others' reputation works great for this.
You wouldn't do a risky business deal with someone whose reputation you didn't know, would you? Well think of reading others' opinions as a kind of transaction. You take on a little risk by buying into someone's opinion. You may change your worldview just a tiny bit based on the value you place on another's comment. That is what conversations are all about. The risk comes from the possibility of adding inconsistencies, falsehoods, or improbabilities to your worldview without realizing it. We don't know all there is to know and so we cannot make perfectly objective and absolute judgments on whatever we come across.
I don't look at the user name.
Of course, if you're going to argue that ad hominem is a virtue....