Thanks and upvoted. Since reading this subthread (and that post you linked to) I've noted a significant increase in my willingness to downvote, and it's partly because I started noticing more of what you're talking about.

Although... I'm not in any important disagreement with you, but I'd rather make it clear that I don't think there's anything shameful about wanting and enjoying karma. After all, the point of karma is that it's supposed to motivate people, else why have a karma system? It's more that, regardless of what motivated a poster to write it, a post with no content (or otherwise not worth seeing) is a bad thing. All the other symptoms you mention just make me pay closer attention to whether a post has meaningful content.

When I put myself in the shoes of someone criticised for making one of those posts, I think it'd feel more fair to be told what was objectively wrong with the post itself, than to just be accused of karma-whoring; what could you possibly say to that, even if the accusation were in error?

comment is made after previous ones, where an edit to a previous comment would have been appropriate (users cannot upvote a single comment multiple times, but multiple comments by a single author are fair play)

Editing an old comment won't show up in the Recent Comments either, so by posting a new comment more people will read it.