I do think the karma system is contributing to this, and I do want to explore ways to modify that. I am happy about more suggestions to do so.
I am skeptical of the owner of a post marking comments as “helpful” or “unhelpful” since this gives people who write top-level posts suddenly drastically more power than people who don’t, even at similar levels of karma. I do think that giving moderators or very-high-karma users the ability to special-upvote or special-downvote something might work out (we’ve been planning on adding karma rewards to the moderator toolkit for a while now, and think this can indeed be used to combat this problem).
I do think the karma system is contributing to this, and I do want to explore ways to modify that. I am happy about more suggestions to do so.
I am skeptical of the owner of a post marking comments as “helpful” or “unhelpful” since this gives people who write top-level posts suddenly drastically more power than people who don’t, even at similar levels of karma. I do think that giving moderators or very-high-karma users the ability to special-upvote or special-downvote something might work out (we’ve been planning on adding karma rewards to the moderator toolkit for a while now, and think this can indeed be used to combat this problem).