zlacker

>>pg+(OP)
Make voting on comments cost karma. Alternately, make new story submission require at least 100 minimum karma level. I suspect the effect here would be to reduce the number of frivolous and spammy submissions. When more high quality submissions are the topics of conversation, the quality of comments will go up.

>>geuis+b1
> new story submission require at least x minimum karma level

This seems to have worked well for stack overflow. Just spitballing here pg, but what if you extended this to commenting as well? HN could be open to browsing, but to comment, you needed to be invited by another member with x karma? You could quantify this by requiring 10 karma to comment and 100 to post, and allowing a user to gain x karma by getting an 'invite' from an existing user with 100 karma.

Of course, without data, it's hard to draw conclusions about the fundamental issues.

>>plusbr+f3
A real part of the value of HN is that you often get comments from the people involved in the story itself - whether it be the author of a post or the developer of a piece of software being discussed or Matt Cutts giving the lowdown on Google's policies.

Some of these people just create an account to make a few contributions on specific threads and then they're gone. Having an invite system would increase the friction in being able to do this.