Yep. Same here. I also check the first page of my profile's "comments" page a few minutes after replying something, but that's it. Probably a bad habit. (I just discovered now that the "threads" link on the top also does that, lol).

Recently I've even been considering using a client stylesheet to hide my karma at the top of the page.

Yeah my karma is the first thing I look at involuntarily even though it's not something I want to care about. I feel sad when a comment doesn't get any attention, and an irrational amount of excitement when I get a couple dozen upvotes, even though I know it's largely a factor of timing (ending up near the top of the page) and sharing popular opinions.

This is what I do. Look for karma change, then click comments. It also makes me more conscious about voting since I do want to indicate to the other person that their comment was meaningful. Which I like HN's voting system and lack of displaying numbers next to other users comments. I think a lot of subtle things HN does encourages more engaged discussions and less heated battles.

Feedback feels important to me.

Internally, for me it's nice to make a distinction between when I a writing for others and when I am writing for myself.

If I am writing for myself, which I often do, it's much like my musical busking practice: I am not doing it for the money or attention, but just because it adds a nice public layer where I feel like I should respect at least some social norms. That addition of a lightweight ruleset feels helpful to me: instead of just eliding over the parts of my thoughts that might not make sense to other people, I am forced to at least notate them in some way.

If I am writing for other people, then it's nice to know how something was received; I really am often curious about what others think.

Getting feedback in this fashion has led me to shut up when I have an unpopular opinion, but even that's a really good thing to know.

It has been helpful to see the couple of points where I wasn't sure how my opinions would be taken, and to then either be taken to task for writing unclearly, find a real problem in my own thinking, or to at least have a chance to gather the wrong-headed arguments people may fall into when confronted with some of my thoughts.

And if I am indeed writing for other people and no one is upvoting, than that's good to know as well-- there is literally no point for me to write something for other people which is completely ignored. That's a good indicator about when I am just writing for myself-- which is almost everything I write and then publish as a comment on HN.

So, to answer the OP, I just check my comments and if there is a response in the top couple I may respond back. But if folks are writing replies to my very old comments I, I am not checking those because I'm guessing they are just writing for themselves.

I feel like the feedback from karma is not really good.

Anything matching the opinion of some echo-chamber can get hundreds of points (be it purely factual, opinion or even being devoid of content). Mildly unpopular opinions, aka "hot takes", the cathartic stuff, can also garner a lot more upvotes. However, curious civil discussion or sourced posts clarifying something non-controversial won't get much attention at all. Because it's boring. Maybe that's alright, though.

The only part where I see karma working as feedback is in possible flame wars. Anything controversial will get lots of downvotes. So it accidentally work as a deterrent I guess.

Well, now I had to upvote your post, because I know, that you will feel good about it.

That sums up my experience as well. I just spent 20 mins trying to make that go away in Safari, I was not able to get Tampermonkey working (possibly due to XSS headers) but Cascadea worked. `#karma { display: none !important; }`

Safari also has a built-in mechanism to achieve this. In Preferences > Advanced > Style sheet, you can pick a custom style sheet file for style overrides.

On HN, there is a good chance that someone else may and will answer a reply to one of your comments. It is good enough for me. I feel like the lack of notification encourages that.

Bad for discussions though.

I've often posted questions, gotten good replies I wanted to follow up on, but didn't realize until weeks later when the thread was stale. I usually take discussions to message boards with basic UX like content notifications.

What I do is, for the few threads where I think it's useful, I keep a browser tab open with only the specific thread I want to watch (click on a comment's timestamp to open only the thread below that comment).

Alternatively, you can use the second menu item "Threads" for an easy overview over all your comment threads including replies to your comments.

This also has the advantage over notifications that you decide when to look at the discussion, instead of waiting for notifications (immediate discussion thread notifications - a great evil of our time).

So like notifications with extra steps?

I can already do that on sites that have basic discussion features, by turning those features off and opening a bunch of tabs.

> So like notifications with extra steps?

I don't understand how you missed the point after I even repeated it in the last paragraph (of just three).

Also, nobody forces or even just asked you to do what others do.

This. Embrace the quiet!

Was strange at first to me too but makes a lot of sense and I appreciate HN not consuming more of my time and adversely impacting my mental health because of it.

Reddit is pretty much built on argument and war of words. They send you instant alert if someone replies to you via 3 channels and want you to check that reply with constant highlighting of new mesages.

They want you to keep track of your karma and get positive dopamine hit with the upvote alerts.

These sites are like drugs. I am surprised why there is not much talk about this.

I've definitely benefitted from the slower pacing.

I'm embarrassed to admit the number of times I was about to go off half-cocked because I hadn't taken the time to carefully read a comment and/or to just calm down.