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.
Fair enough... if that's coming from a small number of highly-ranked comments, that is indeed evidence that a lot of people are interested in the exchange. (If it's a large number of low-ranked comments, it's equally consistent with a small number of people who endorse your engagement in it.)
Thanks for the counterargument.
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?