http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders shows at least a hundred with over 1000, and probably many more than that considering the falloff in points becomes more gradual as you go down the list. My comments are nothing special and I have >6000 karma. Even if only 10% of those people are still active, there will be no shortage of endorsers for the livelier discussions.

Why is there a blank line in the list between jrockway and cwan? Is it someone whose account was deleted?

It's just top-10.

The HN leaderboard shows 100 users with > 15500 points, they mostly all seem to be active users, and the scores seem to be doing the usual long tail dropoff that such distributions tend to do.

So I would expect there to be a ton of active HN users with more than 1000 points.

according to a comment in this thread, there are 5500 users with over 1000 points. Whether they are active or not is unknown. Whether they want to view pending comments or just read and comment like normal users is unknown.

If you are in this >1000 karma club, please approve this comment. I have been a user for 1044 days.

It's not that hard to get to 1000+ slowly. All you have to do is hang around for years and make the occasional decent comment. If anything this is biased towards old timers.

It's not currently that hard to get to 1000+ slowly. By slowing down commenting and making it harder to even get comments through, this is presumably going to make it harder.

I browser HN daily, been around for coming up on a year, and I'm not even half way there.

Since commenting is such a huge aspect of these sites for me, I'll probably frequent HN much less often since I won't be able to participate in conversation. PARTICULARLY, I won't be able to get in the early comments that are necessary for making high-karma. You can't have your comment show up an hour or so later after "approval," you'll only net a handful of upvotes, because you'll be buried under the high-scoring top comments by senior HN users.

Perhaps make a mid tier, say 500 karma, where you can't endorse users, but don't need endorsement?

So now we have to wait years to be considered good enough posters to be allowed to fully participate?

Not, years, months; assuming a couple of decent comments per day, with a couple of points per answer( my definition of a couple is ~ 2-4 here ).

I've been around for 250 days or so and am not even halfway there.

Then again, I only say something whenever I feel I have something to add, rather than just blasting comments and hoping to get upvotes (and now, endorsements)

I think this would result in a worse off situation because by allowing users with X karma to remove comments and prevent other users from commenting, it is effectively censoring them.

True, however you could require say 4 users to block a comment out and this maybe would mitigate the problem a little?

I think the point I was trying to make was that by turning it around it would require "less" active participation from the users and by default everyone gets a chance, but the really bad comments would still get removed I think. Anyway we shall see how it works out!