Let me say that a little more clearly:
Someone might argue that “the commentariat on LesserWrong are a group of people who are more nitpicky and less helpful than my friends on Facebook”. I’m not sure if this is a strawman.
But I’d like to propose, instead, that the comments being posted on LesserWrong are the result of people responding to incentives imposed by the karma system. For whatever reason, it appears that these incentives are leading people to post nitpicky and unhelpful comments. Improving the karma system might fix the incentives.
You’ve suggested elsewhere that the post owner might move irrelevant comments to an “off-topic” section, and that’s a good way to deal with off-topic comments. But what if a comment is directly replying to my post, but I just sort of feel like it’s nitpicky and unhelpful? I could mark it as “off-topic”, but this wouldn’t be strictly accurate.
Instead, I’d propose letting the post owner mark certain comments as “helpful”, which would be worth +10 karma, or would double the value of all karma received, or it would sort those posts to the top where more people would see them, or something.
This behavior of writing a post and getting unhelpful comments: is it something that can be changed by tweaking the karma system?
Like, right now, if I read a post and think of a true-but-unhelpful objection, maybe I post the objection in the hope of getting upvotes.
But maybe if you make the post author’s upvotes worth more than upvotes by random schmoes, then I optimize more for posting things the post author will like?