I understand the fun in painting what people are doing in the blackest possible colors. It's a parlor game and gives a buzz to both the writer and reader. But in doing so, you smear black paint all over the parlor. We're trying to make HN a better place to be than that, so please don't play that game here.
Thanks, dang. It was once true that a surefire way to rack up a large amount of karma in HN was to make a nasty, uncharitable statement like that. I've experienced the weird ridiculous thrill of it myself, on another account, along with the deflating realization that I'm being rewarded (such as it is, karma having no actual value) for participating in the destruction of civilized discourse. I appreciate you actively stepping in and articulating the argument against such "parlor games" and the drive to make HN different in that way, even though I've seen that it doesn't always win you fans in the community.
You can label and the differences between extremely low karma accounts and 0 karma accounts however you'd like, but a low karma account has more power over the content of the site than a zero karma account.
I also don't think it can be easily ruled out that there are additional, higher karma thresholds upon which an account may be bestowed with additional powers (rate-limit loosening, for example).
It can easily be ruled out by asking us. The highest karma threshold (that I recall, at least) is the downvoting one at 500. Pretty much all the others are 30 or lower.
I feel reasonably confident that there aren't karma rewards for people with more karma than me, although there should be some kind of sick reward for it.
I actually appreciate your point a lot more than it probably seems like I do (not counting the rude bit, which was out of place and wide of the mark). The counterargument only becomes compelling when you start to think practically about the effect snark etc. has on online communities. This is an externality, so it is easy to overlook and not always in the interest of individual actors to take care of.
We could compare it to a company that makes a good product (in this case, a good point about funding and the politics of research) while polluting the local environment (the community here). The solution isn't to ignore the pollution, nor to justify it.
Fortunately for all of us, it's not only possible to make the product without polluting, but the product comes out better when one does so. But this doesn't happen by default; the default is the opposite. That's why I post moderation comments, at the cost of off-topicness. In the long run, the plan (and the unsolved system design problem!) is to get the desired effect without posting such things, which are as tedious to write as they are to read.
What strikes you as being particularly psychoanalytic about it? The comment is certainly taking an unnecessarily cynical view of the topic, and doing so is almost always intended to position the author and those who he persuades as superior (i.e. "giving them a buzz").
I understand the fun in painting what people are doing in the blackest possible colors. It's a parlor game and gives a buzz to both the writer and reader. But in doing so, you smear black paint all over the parlor. We're trying to make HN a better place to be than that, so please don't play that game here.