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Comment by codegeek | Hacker News Reader

You are looking at it the wrong way. You should comment when you feel the need to add value to the discussion. In fact, the more good/meaningful comments you post, the more chance you have to get upvoted and actually increase you average over time.

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In my experience, this is a semi-truthful account of how karma on HN is awarded.

I say semi-true in the sense that it's not wholly inaccurate. Valuable and thoughtful posts are rewarded and up-voted.

However, if my goal were to game the system for maximum karma per unit of time & post, I would contribute comments to hot-button issues that were in line with the prevailing mentality.

This is not to be facetious at all. I'm sure the moderators are well aware of this, but it's quite astounding how many up-votes are thrown around in discussions on polarizing topics (e.g. gender issues, NSA surveillance, etc.).

In my experience, up/down votes correlate more closely to agreement/disagreement than to whether they are good or meaningful. Knowing the audience of HN is often more important than adding to the discussion. That doesn't mean that good or meaningful comments are useless. But if you do present a good and meaningful argument that goes against the majority, you will often be silenced. This frequently results in that person deleting their comment as the downvotes accumulate. I'm not sure how this is accounted for in the statistics of the site.

The amount of upvotes a comment earns is a function of how many upvotes the parent submission receives. (Makes sense: the more upvotes the parent receives, the more people will see your comment)

Often I see threads in new submissions which ask for quick feedback to a startup idea or blog post. They would never get upvotes enough to hit the front page normally, and so I would rarely get more than 1-2 upvotes for them.

I used to do that, but my clear impression was that pandering to Silicon Valley trope was a more consistent way to have votes. I repeatedly got bad scores when pointing at problematic misuses of statistics, and unhelpful US-centric focus. I hesitated to keep on, but I stopped both when I learned my score affected my ability to contribute.

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