Karma. It's pointless.

After a while, I find myself focusing too much on that little number. Happened on slashdot, digg, reddit, and now hackernews.

I find that I just can't help treating it something like a game, upping my karma score.

It's a mildly destructive pattern which tends to lead to shallower comments, echoing popular opinions winning out over genuine insight in my commenting habits. I'm sure it contributes to meme propagation on other sites (thankfully HN is still relatively free of memes).

The hack: in your profile page, change topcolor to black.

Then hackernews looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/eK796.png

This means I literally have no idea what my karma score is day-to-day. It's liberating. Try it.

If you need to see where the 'threads' link is or etc, just Ctrl-A or Cmd-A on mac, which highlights all text and you can then see where the links are. I find that for 'new' 'newest' and 'threads' I've learned where they are.

Yeah. Just a small thing. If you find yourself caring too much about karma, try it.