I'm a long time lurker and have recently started commenting on HN. Recently I posted a rather trite comment[0] and to my surprise got 16 upvotes whereas my other well written (IMO) comments got just a couple. Just out of curiosity, what are your top voted comments and how much karma did they earn?
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8670396
I basically said that spaceflight is where the airline industry used to be; rough around the edges, expensive, inherently dangerous. But the airline industry today is safe and inexpensive compared to how it was back in the day.
Spaceflight is still at a young stage so unfortunately I will say that the Virgin Galactic tragedy, and the NASA/Orbital Science launch failure will not be the last accidents to come. In fact, we will need more accidents to understand where we are going wrong.
The vast majority of my highly-upvoted comments (subjectively) are clever jokes or something similar. The fact of the matter is that the submissions I've made (especially technical ones) tend not to gain much karma, nor very many carefully thought-out posts.
Furthermore, the posts that usually are well-thought out and carefully worded often actually perform worse than the flippant ones, because I'm typically making a point or exploring a topic in a way that makes people uncomfortable. This is especially true now that the community has heeded pg's (really shortsighted) directive that downvotes are for mere disagreement (and unarticulated disagreement/disapproval at that!).
There are a number of ways of gaming the system if you think a bit, ranging from the obvious (downvote other posts to increase your chances of getting points) to the non-obvious (upvote posts you don't agree with so that you can get a solid word in edgewise) to the absurd (constantly watch the new section and try to mass submit your posts all at once before the throttling filter catches on). Quantity has a quality all its own.
You're better off just posting like a sane person, though. You'll enjoy yourself more, your posts will be better regarded, and you'll have a more positive effect on the community.
tl,dr: it's just internet funbucks, so don't lose sleep over it.