I suggested this before, but I think it was well after you stopped reading the threads. Let me try again:

Why not show a percentile for comments? Before there are 10 or 20 or so comments on a page, don't show any score of any kind (except maybe gray out really bad comments). Then, when the number of comments is high enough, display a percentile compared to all the other positively ranked comments. You can still use points internally, but you display a much fuzzier number to users. It is useful to quickly pick out the best comments to read, but once a comment becomes one of the best in the thread, no one will have to keep voting it up (and similar for down). People will just cast votes to say "this comment is over (or under) valued" not to say "This comment deserves another (or one less) karma point".

I'd really love to see you run that experiment for a day or two :-) What do you say?

Good idea; I'll consider it.

That's a really nice idea actually.

I would love to see this - I think it's a very promising idea.

Hope this suggestion catches on, it sounds good.

Ok. That would help a lot.

It will at least make people that have been here for a long time have the same privileges as an account that is less than 5 minutes old.

I'd hate to be in your shoes on this one, it's one of those 'damned if you do/damned if you don't' kind of things.

From the sidelines it is easy enough to criticize but I've run enough websites to know that a users point of view is not always the same as the point of view of the person that tries to maintain the atmosphere.

I'm all for dropping the points, in fact, as far as I'm concerned you can drop the leaderboard as well.

If someone is interested in the karma of a user they can always go and look at the profile.

At least like that we get rid of stupid comments like 'I made it my mission to be in the top 100'.

The leaderboard does not really seem like it is that impressive anyway. It seems to me that a well formulated bot could easily surpass the highest ranked listings at this point.

Think of the leaderboard as an odometer, it basically logs how much time you spend on HN.

If I had to put a number on it I'd say 1 karma point today equates anywhere from 1 to 5 minutes of work on HN.

If you were to express that in money, given the kind of expertise that walks around here anybody on the leaderboard has spent upwards of several thousand $ worth of their time, which gives you an idea of how much they get back out of it.