who is generating interest but who has fairly dismal kharma. Explain.
My tentative explanation is that it's not actually generating as much interest as you suggest.
Rather, there are a small number of people generating a vast number of comments that don't seem to generate any useful progress, and thus don't garner much karma.
Admittedly I'm mostly generalizing from my own experience here... that kind of volume: content ratio is not something I want to see more of (and is, indeed, something I'd like to see less of), and the low karma scores seem consistent with the idea that other people are like me in this respect.
That said, I could be wrong... it may be that lots of other people find that dialog worthwhile, that I'm the exception, and that the karma scores have some other explanation I haven't thought of.
Personally, I don't think the votes are anything people should care about.
To the extent (A) that votes on X's comments/posts reflect other people's desire to have stuff like those comments/posts on this site, and to the extent (B) that X cares about other people's desires, X should care about votes.
Of course, extent A is difficult to determine with confidence, and extent B is a consequence of X's values. For myself, I estimate A to be fairly high, and B is pretty high for me, so I care about votes and I think I should care about them.
Rather, there are a small number of people generating a vast number of comments that don't seem to generate any useful progress, and thus don't garner much karma.
I've obtained a delta of about +100 karma in this discussion. So this explanation seems wrong.
My impression is that critiques of lesswrong mainstream positions and arguments for contrary positions are received well and achieve high karma scores when they are of very high quality. Similarly posts and comments that take lesswrong mainstream positions will still be voted down if they are of very low quality. But in between there seems to be a gulf: Moderately low quality mainstream comments will stay at 0 to -1 karma while contra-mainstream comments of (apparently) similar quality score solidly negative karma, moderately high quality mainstream comments achieve good positive karma while similar quality contra-mainstream comments stay at 0 to 2.
Do you share my impression? And if this is the case, should we try to do something about it?