I’m sure everybody’s different, but I don’t particularly care about people’s karma scores when looking at discussion threads.

While no place is perfect, I think the HN community and moderators do a decent job of moderating threads and preventing flame wars while also supporting the sharing of different views.

With the rise of AI, there’s a noticeable uptick of bots attempting to submit articles and comments to HN. You rarely see this low-quality content make it to the front page. That’s a lot of thankless community work.

Hey, I feel your pain. Here's a way to get a high karma account: focus on grinding on submissions around popular topics. Even if you can get just a few upvotes they are worth it.

Submissions cannot be downvoted. Only comments can be downvoted.

Try to keep the comments neutralish or at least built a pool of good karma around your submissions first, and then work the comments.

Good luck.