I've been wondering if karma is really a good system, for exactly that reason. I think I've only had a comment down-voted in to the negatives once, so I can reasonably predict that any vaguely 'quality' comment is likely to make my karma go up. I'd think it better to encourage users who produce "+10 karma" comments, not those who produce ten "+1 karma" posts.
Of course, as a simple bar to "unlock" privileges, it works well, but then you could just have it show "50+" once everything is unlocked.
And on the gripping hand, it does encourage me to try and cement my thoughts and speak up any time I feel I have something to contribute :)
This is an entirely reasonable concern. But the comments are generally the highest quality I can think of on almost any forum. So I'd say it's certainly not broken.
Eliezer Yudkowsky has passed an arbitrary milestone: 100,000 karma points on Less Wrong. Allow me just a moment to celebrate this like we celebrate other arbitrary milestones, like birthdays.
I think that Eliezer's karma score vastly under-rates his relative contribution to this site. For example, his score is only about 13x my own score, but I think it's obvious he has contributed far more than 13x as much value to this community as I have.
This is probably due to the fact that good posts today get far more upvotes than earlier good posts, when I suspect the community was smaller. For example, my rather simple and insignificant post Secure Your Beliefs received 34 upvotes, which is more than almost any of Eliezer's epic and brilliant posts of the past have received, for example Terminal Values and Instrumental Values.
So at this arbitrary milestone, I'd just like to say a quick word to Eliezer:
Thanks.
You've done a lot.
Okay, that's all! I hope this doesn't come across as "sucking up to the Dear Leader," but instead as the sincere appreciation it is. There is a good reason I list Eliezer as one of my heroes-even-though-we-shouldn't-have-'heroes' over here.