Do you have proof for you claims? I am under the impression that 500 rep essentially maxes out your standard privileges and that no reputation based weighting is applied to votes.

If your fear is that there are voting rings (which apparently the system tries to detect) then resetting the rep will give them more relative power not less.

Personally I dont pay any attention to the rep of a user when evaluating how I should or should not engage with them. I think things are working just fine at the moment.

If you are frustrated by repetitive homepage content, I recommend you switch to the "new" view as there is lots of diversity there.

Again, if you have any proof that a cadre of nefarious high profile users are somehow abusing the system I would love to see it.

I agree with your observations, but my conclusion from it is therefore karma isn’t worth worrying about. Not uncommon for me to see heavily upvoted material I disagree with, or vice-versa, and am resigned to the fact that bot traffic will be a significant factor on both counts. I still get to view both. Unlike reddit, it seems unpopular opinions still have a home at HN. Karma is mostly for the bots, not me.

Unfortunately there's not much you can do here and it is not going to happen despite HN being in fact far worse today than it was a decade ago.

The site is unfortunately filled with rampant upvote rings, AI agents / bots commenting, users that have certain privileges who can rapidly comment and reply without getting throttled and now we have slop filled posts in Show HN and some instances of crypto memecoin scams.

Things would have to get significantly far worse (spam, AI agents, constant rule breaking) for a reset with new rules. It may happen, but we are not there yet.