One problem with setting the limit too high is that the voter base becomes unbalanced in a problematic way; is it really useful to have downvotes if only ~50 people can use them, but ~5000 people can use upvotes?
Yes, it seems to me that would be useful. Concretely, it might make the difference between whether clearly-bad-but-not-ban-worthy content ends up at +1 or −2. If >10k isn’t enough people, something like >3k would still come with a pretty minimal risk of abuse.
edit: On rereading your comment, it sounds like you’re saying a high threshold for downvoting has problems relative to a low threshold. I agree with this, but what we currently have is no downvoting. I suspect the ideal policy in terms of site quality (but not politics/PR/attractiveness to newcomers) is a medium-sized whitelist of voters selected by a trusted, anonymous entity, with no voting (up or down) outside this whitelist.
One problem with setting the limit too high is that the voter base becomes unbalanced in a problematic way; is it really useful to have downvotes if only ~50 people can use them, but ~5000 people can use upvotes?
Yes, it seems to me that would be useful. Concretely, it might make the difference between whether clearly-bad-but-not-ban-worthy content ends up at +1 or −2. If >10k isn’t enough people, something like >3k would still come with a pretty minimal risk of abuse.
edit: On rereading your comment, it sounds like you’re saying a high threshold for downvoting has problems relative to a low threshold. I agree with this, but what we currently have is no downvoting. I suspect the ideal policy in terms of site quality (but not politics/PR/attractiveness to newcomers) is a medium-sized whitelist of voters selected by a trusted, anonymous entity, with no voting (up or down) outside this whitelist.
These two words do not match well.
Trusted by the site owners, anonymous to others. (This is not actually a practical suggestion, so it doesn’t matter.)
Yes, if you don’t net them. And in general, a +X -Y display is much more informative than a single number.