To whoever downvoted this: What do you want me to do, ignore him?

As a meta point, perhaps it would be useful to have a quick acronym for requesting that nobody upvote or downvote your comment because it's not supposed to function as anything other than a quick acknowledgement or something. Maybe we could do "KF" for "karma freeze". Like, "Thank you. KF"

I don't know if this would catch on or anything, but one of the annoying things about the current karma system is that it creates this atmosphere where everything must be "all business" or something. What if I just want to signal a brief acknowledgement or whatever? Am I supposed to just deal with the inevitable downvotes?

A norm for marking your comment as being "not for karma appraisal" may be useful because you could use it to signal that you're not looking for karma, and just trying to engage in some social nicety or whatever. I suspect that part of the reason why the sort of comment I'm replying to here often gets downvoted is because it may almost seem like the person writing the comment is hoping for some extra karma or something.

I don't know. Even if this wouldn't be a good way to solve it, I nevertheless think it's a problem that I always have to expect to get downvoted when I acknowledge somebody without adding anything substantial, or whatever. Sometimes there's really nothing else to say besides a quick positive acknowledgement, and sometimes not doing that quick signal would be socially suboptimal.