Well, since you already know about the karma threshold, which is apparently 500 right now (it has risen over time), and you're getting downvoted for asking about it, let me tell you that downvoting other people isn't all it's cracked up to be...

Meanwhile, I'll steal this from a real HN veteran... I know there's been a lot of talk about the quality of comments or about the increased negativity, but I still really subscribe to this theory, which I take no credit for.

          Quality of Hacker News Comments Over Time

   |                   . .
   |                  .   . 
  q| . .             .     .
  u|    .           .       .               . . .
  a|     .         .          .           .       .
  l|      .       .              .      .           .
  i|       .     .                  . .               .    
  t|        . . .                       you are here -->. .
  y|                                      (that's all)
   |________________________________________________________
    J A S O N D J F M A M J J A S O N D J F M A M J J A S O

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4365778

Is there some sort of tool to generate Ascii graphs out there?

Is there some sort of source on this graph or is it a prove-a-point type thing. Just wondering, because if there was some way to measure quality of posts over time (up/down vote ratio?) that would be a really neat metric.

It's a reference to the notion of Eternal September, from usenet lore. To summarize from memory perhaps incorrectly, usenet used to be great but get worse qualitatively when school would start in September. Its quality would increase throughout the year as people learned to communicate appropriately. One year, however, it just never got better...

... when AOL started offering access to Usenet.

(In reality, Usenet was pretty great through most of the '90s; warez killed Usenet, not newcomers).

> I'm not sure if my tolerance for snarky, dipshit comments like this has gone down lately, or if there are a lot more snarky dipshits on this site now.

there are, I just spotted one.