I was going to modify my HN natural-language search engine to try to build this dataset for you, but then http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4491894 just happened (the submission from uncrunched.com where Mike Arrington weighs in on the whole stupid Google Ventures tempest-in-a-teapot).
A bunch of those comments are adding absolutely nothing of value to HN. A bunch of them are just picking on Arrington as a controversial figure. And, of those, most of them are by accounts with close to 100 karma, or less.
For what it's worth, I've thought for quite a while that forcing users to spend karma might be a worthwhile experiment, mostly because of comment threads like that one. One of the big failures over at Reddit is the huge number of people who can create an account and post a completely vacuous comment in a matter of seconds; on a popular thread, there can be thousands of comments voted to 0 or less, just crowding out any good content that might be left.
On the other hand, karma-as-currency potentially encourages further gaming of the site; it could conceivably lead to e.g. fewer unpopular-but-not-wrong comments, and more popular-but-not-insightful comments.
A bunch of those comments are adding absolutely nothing of value to HN. A bunch of them are just picking on Arrington as a controversial figure. And, of those, most of them are by accounts with close to 100 karma, or less.
For what it's worth, I've thought for quite a while that forcing users to spend karma might be a worthwhile experiment, mostly because of comment threads like that one. One of the big failures over at Reddit is the huge number of people who can create an account and post a completely vacuous comment in a matter of seconds; on a popular thread, there can be thousands of comments voted to 0 or less, just crowding out any good content that might be left.
On the other hand, karma-as-currency potentially encourages further gaming of the site; it could conceivably lead to e.g. fewer unpopular-but-not-wrong comments, and more popular-but-not-insightful comments.