Perhaps subjectively this change did improve the comment quality a bit, I still see plenty of ongoing examples of the problem though. What I'd like to see is the actual removal of karma (at least comment karma) from the user profiles as well.
I see no good reason to incentivize intelligent thoughtful conversation, no one actually does it for karma. I do realize there is a bit of a feedback system in place (upvotes tell you you're doing the right thing, downvotes suggest you should change your tack). So perhaps you can still see the overall direction of your comment (like the current gray for downvotes).
Obviously voting should still stick around so people can bump the best comments to the top of a thread, but any sort of visible scoring system on comments seems more likely to work against it's own intent than for it.
Comment karma can provide constructive feedback to the comment's author. Often, but not always, a downvoted comment indicates that my point was not made clearly or that there were gratuitous remarks within the comment whose removal would improve the tone of the comment overall. Of course, sometimes comments are just downvoted because someone disagrees or because I intentionally was snarky.
Likewise, upvotes indicate that I have captured a portion of my audience's attention. Often this is because of some minor insight or extension of the conversation, though certainly on occasion I have been rewarded for snark.
In general, gamification is a viable system for influencing user behavior, and if only submissions were rewarded with karma, a great deal of undesirable behavior would be encouraged. The current system helps new HN'ers learn the ropes.
I think that it isn't about incentivizing intelligent thoughtful conversation but rather disincentivizing the dumb or mean comments. People dislike losing karma a lot more than they like to gain karma. What pg observes in his article on Trolls[1], written a year before this one, is that controversial ideas which are modded down tend to be stubbornly left up while the wisecracks which are modded down tend to be deleted because there is less invested in them.
I try to make it a point to downvote any dumb/mean comments I see, even if I completely agree with the sentiment. If it's particularly mean or inflammatory, I'll also flag it.
Unfortunately, sometimes people sabotage that effort by upvoting said dumb/mean comments. I'd like to see a disincentive applied to those upvotes somehow. Like, perhaps, if a comment is flagged to death, deleted by a moderator, or results in a hellbanning, everyone who upvoted it should get a karma ding and a "please don't upvote mean or dumb comments like [quote of comment]" message.
(commenting from my high-karma account, to avoid the green-user stigma)
I see no good reason to incentivize intelligent thoughtful
conversation, no one actually does it for karma.
I comment to grind karma points. There's a fairly linear relationship between comment length and score, my best comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3705599https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3218642) are essentially small blog posts, requiring research, links, several drafts and extensive revision. If it wasn't for karma, I wouldn't go to the effort.
So what do you fell that karma "earns you" that makes it worth the effort? Is it something intrinsic to karma, or something about what you think karma says about you to others? If the latter, then do you think karma is the best way to deliver that value?
I still have the urge to grind karma, though I've passed the limit for downvoting. The reason is that I remember when the downvote karma threshold was raised from 250 to 500 karma, a year or two ago. I'm worried that in a year or three, PG will raise the limit again, and I'll be unable to downvote again. So karma remains an effective motivator - though I kind of resent that I don't know whether my further karma generation will ever pay off. I would feel better if PG had an official formula or schedule for the inflation of downvote thresholds, or if he said that the threshold will stay the same for the foreseeable future.
I see no good reason to incentivize intelligent thoughtful conversation, no one actually does it for karma. I do realize there is a bit of a feedback system in place (upvotes tell you you're doing the right thing, downvotes suggest you should change your tack). So perhaps you can still see the overall direction of your comment (like the current gray for downvotes).
Obviously voting should still stick around so people can bump the best comments to the top of a thread, but any sort of visible scoring system on comments seems more likely to work against it's own intent than for it.