Agreed. I find karma average of little interest. Unfortunately it does encourage a certain type of bad behavior in those who do. I can appreciate what pg is trying to achieve with it, but I don't think it's helped the site, and in fact has perhaps detracted from some conversations that "could have happened" except the people came late to the thread.

I personally sometimes won't bother commenting on a low comment simply because there is little chance of an interesting coversation happening there.

The other thing that's messed up now is duplicate submission. They should be forbidden again. Find a way to get the duped article to the front page if we're trying to make sure it's seen (maybe with a different decay constant), but allowing the resubmission takes away the original conversation.