There is more value for having karma on this site than Reddit. You unlock new HackerNews abilities (flag, report, vouch) as you hit certain point thresholds. Reddit has no such feature.
> other than a low one-time threshold where you gain an unimportant power
What power is "important" in your opinion? Is being able to flag or vouch for flagged links unimportant?
It could be that. It could be AI farming. Ask questions you want AI to be able to answer, get a bunch of reasonable comments for the models to gobble up. Next time you ask google, gemeni might even post links to this very post! I'd say it's 50/50 if it's for AI or astroturfing.