Comments, although disappointingly I always seem to get a big karma spike for throwaway one-liners, and what I consider my more contributing/interesting comments tend to be ignored. I know I'm not the only one, but it can be frustrating.

There's a Redditor called Sure_Ill_Draw_That who sums up the whole karma thing quite succinctly:

http://i.imgur.com/7gNZW.png

My general answer is "I don't get karma", because I generally read Hacker News Daily (10 top-rated articles from the previous day), so though I do comment sometimes, my comments are almost never modded in any direction, as everyone else has moved on. I don't post things -- there's more material worth reading on the front page than I can get through already.

Every once in a while I get into an interesting conversation in a subthread somewhere -- where a commenter is actually checking back -- but karma comes from the masses, not from individual conversations.

It doesn't matter much, though -- I don't have enough karma to downvote, but I'm not inclined to downvote much anyway -- so it's pretty irrelevant.

Are there other bonuses that high karma earn you, besides bragging rights? On Slashdot (I still go back to visit now & again...) I seem to have the right to disable ads, but obviously that wouldn't apply here.

Well, out of curiosity I've gone and checked. In the last week or so I've made 30 contributions. These give me:

    3 points for a single bare comment
   89 points for three polls 
   13 points for three submissions of a site I'm associated with
  285 points for links to other sites.

Not sure that helps, but you did ask.

A couple of my blog posts were very well received, but I've noticed that often times (although not recently so who knows) I can't downvote someone that has a higher average comment score than I do. Which in turn gives them a higher average comment score... So besides the rep you get when you stay active in a community you also get an edge for your total karma to go up. But then again, I love the content here, so something must be working :)

I was thinking of this question from a different angle. I sometimes feel guilty because a large portion of my karma comes not from technical or business topics, but from more social commentary things.

I occasionally get downmodded pretty hard for presenting a reasoned argument with citations, especially . Populist one-liners every now and then more than make up for it, though.

Stupid Question:

How do you know where your karma comes from?

I'm new, just comments at the moment

I don't give a you know what for karma!