At least in this case if people want to be strident or acerbic, they have to work for it.
Another possibility would be to look at the words people used. I'm pretty sure you could train a spam filter to recognize lame comments.
Also, not related to the topic so much, I find it funny that I often see people say "I do not care about points." but are also the most likely people to make suggestions about new ways to implement the points system.
I think you are onto something here.
It is supposed to reference the idea that there isn't any intrinsic merit in verbosity, and that we often prize writing that is pared down and says only what it needs to - prose or code, and as a group prize languages that allow conciseness with joy going to Ruby, reverence to R and J, and fear and loathing to XML.
Particularly PG who has written more than once about Lisp and how it allows dense code to express a lot, so much so indeed that he reduced function creation to 'fn' in the language that backs this very site on which you are suggesting longer comments are the answer.
(See? Not so insightful, sharp and cool now, is it?)
Instead, you should debate the merits of the idea. I was actually not so much advocating the idea as I was bringing it up for discussion - you can tell by the tone of my comment. And, while I questioned myself for even bringing up the idea of a length requirement, your response makes me lean a little bit more towards the idea.
When voting, I vote up for "interesting point", for "you put a lot of effort into this reply" and for "I agree" and "ha!". I feel conflicted downvoting a comment I like even if it's not contributory, and I don't want to upvote a comment I disagree with even if it's a good contribution. Split the two up so the conflict goes away.
You are playing into the cult of personality
It's what the site's design encourages - usernames are prominent, vote scores are prominent and tallied as the main measure of a person, popular comments get votes. Big thoughtful comments and deep discussion get squashed into nesting and pushed aside by the ever increasing flood of new submissions. "Furthering the discussion" as you put it ... what does this mean to you? Who is supposed to benefit and how, and does the site design encourage that?
Since the site owner pg is in on this thread, the community may benefit by Paul getting some feedback and ideas on how to improve the site.
The site's design does encourage conversation of course. Comments are threaded to encourage back-and-forth, and voting moderation promotes good comments and helps to keep the discussion civil.
I too like to get some karma, but I'll sometimes write something that I suspect may be down-voted (or even that I may not believe) just because I like to discuss things. Karma doesn't really matter on this site or affect your experience (other than being able to down-vote comments), and I think that fact encourages people not to treat it very seriously.
I'd like to see a more sophisticated quality detection system - a learning text classifier of some sort. PG might have enough experience in that field of programming to come up with something useful along those lines.
Okay that took nine.