The biggest problem with Hacker News comments -- actually, make that all comments -- is fundamental: the sort of people that leave comments are (more often than not) people that want something, ANYTHING, to say, not people that have something to say.
I think the karma system can also be a contributor to this. Any comment you make has the chance to get a few upvotes, regardless of how little it contributes to the conversation. So people just spam comments to get a few points here and there.
This phenomena can be seen in forums without karma also but i think in places with karma it is usually worse, worst offenders being digg and reddit where everybody tries to make a silly joke as those are easy points.
A better algotithm calculating the karma as an average over all your comments maybe could help..
I have mixed feelings about karma. It's nice to have filters that bring (mostly) better comments to the top, but I think it results in more silenced voices than it does posts-for-karma's-sake.
It's validating to get a few upvotes, but more than that it's disheartening to spend time on a comment and recieve no feedback whatsoever.
I'm an outgoing person, but I find myself shying away from commenting on HN for that reason. Admittedly, I don't usually have some brilliant insight, but it does make it harder to feel like part of the community.
It might also be interesting to rate-limit commenters (perhaps based on their previous upvotes per comment).
If you are new to HN, you may only post one comment per week.
The "better" (as measured by karma) your comments are, the more comments per week you may post.
This might make commenters consider whether their comment is really so important that they sacrifice another opportunity to comment in the future.
The "average" (on your user page, seemingly over your last few comments) seems to matter more for how high your posts appear. I've found myself deliberately not replying when someone makes an interesting reply to a comment of mine a few days afterwards, because posting that reply brings my average down. Which is definitely a bug.
It would also favour the short and succinct over the long and rambling. Which sounds like a good thing, if you believe that useful information can be distilled losslessly.
If that were the case, the solution would be simple: just skip reading comments.
On the contrary I often learn useful things from HN comments. Sometimes I even submit stuff to HN because I am curious about the opinion of HN commentators.
> it's OK if people just leave anything as a comment here because it will be modded down if it's irrelevant to the discussion.
It would be great if down voting was more prevalent. Many people don't down vote for anything but the absolute worst comment. Some people downvote for disagreement and not poor comment.
I don't think that's a problem. I think that's by design. Internet forums are similar to bars where people gather to hang out and talk about common interests. There are other outlets where the people that have something to say can say it.
Somehow I think your comment applies to TV, radio and writers. The signal-to-noise ratio is getting worse and worse I think (as a side note, I thing signal-to-noise is also one of the frequent HN comments :D)
