My main reason for not commenting more often was because I was afraid that... hmm... I made a few attempts to finish this sentence, but so far all of them triggered one of the excuse-generating modules that I've noticed in my brain. So maybe I'll just leave that sentence unfinished. Basically, I was afraid that posting more comments would somehow have net negative utility, for reasons that it turns out don't actually make sense.

So I guess I'll start posting anything I think is relevant, until I start getting downvotes. Rather than asking here about whether specific things would be a bad idea (copypasting stream-of-thought comments I wrote while I was reading a LW article, without bothering to erase bits I later realize don't make sense?), I'll just go ahead and post until I start getting downvotes. I have a bad habit of overestimating the badness of negative feedback. Even if karma isn't a perfectly accurate measurement of whether my comments are having a positive or negative effect, it's still a reasonably useful approximation, so I'll go ahead and just try to maximize my total karma, rather then preemptively panicking about any post that I suspect might get downvoted... which is pretty much any comment I could possibly make...

And then there's the Umeshism "If you've never posted a comment that got downvoted, your comments are boring", or would that be "If you've never posted a comment that got downvoted, you're not posting enough comments"?

Then there's the question of how much time to spend reviewing and tweaking my comments, but I guess karma can answer that too.

Then there's the question of whether to treat a zero-karma post as actually having negative value, just cluttering the comments thread... that seems like a more difficult question.