Comment by dang
4 years ago
You're talking about the mechanism that sama wrote about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026954.
It's really hard to devise software protections to help HN stay within its mandate that don't at the same time end up penalizing a certain amount of benign activity. It's a bit like how white blood cells also kill some things that aren't a threat. But the solution is not to turn off the white blood cells - that would be really bad.
It must be no coincidence that my karma lately has seen a modest boost, rising out from the negatives.
Personally I think downvotes should also be calibrated by user, a person who rarely downvotes should carry more weight in a downvote than someone who downvotes everything, and perhaps even have user-to-user calibration where your downvotes against someone become weaker the more you target them. It would help nerf people who scour a post history looking for more comments to downvotes, and help prevent downvote gangs of people who consistently downvote the same person no matter what they post.
A certain amount of dissenting opinion is necessary to keep discussions novel and break up echo chambers, but you don’t want to allow so much that you become poisoned by it.