Ask HN: Wouldn't it make sense to calculate karma on comments, not submissions?
It seems irrelevant and unrelated to a specific user that an article that is picked at random and heavily discussed gives the submitter a large number of karma points while the submitters not 'chosen' but who have contributed in equal measure ( and often earlier than the one upvoted ) receive nothing.
One would think, this being a community, upvoted comments would be a much more useful measure for karma, possibly the only one needed ?
Completely disagree. The articles are the most valuable part of the site.
Regardless of personality or politics, most can rightly agree that things like "Fancy Euclid's “Elements” in TeX" or "Text rendering using multi channel signed distance fields" are noteworthy accomplishments.
What some asshole thinks about those things, and what a bunch of other assholes think about his thinking, are neither here nor there--this comment included.
That would depend on how karma is used, right? I'm not sure if it is well known how various HN algorithms depend on karma.
I thought the point of HN is to share intellectually interesting stories and points of view, with karma etc. just being a (maybe) necessary by-product.
I feel your proposition would not affect this goal in a good way.
Karma is given to reward good contributions. There is perhaps an optimal scaling of each type of upvote, but without further study, a 1:1 ratio seems pretty reasonable.
Upvoted comments do get karma, just as upvoted stories do.