The idea is mainly to keep new users from wrecking the site by downvoting everything. Since things tend to get upvoted over time, everyone who participates (and doesn’t seriously piss off the community) tends to get a slow trickle of karma even if they don’t post anything astounding.
It was a quick-fix sort of solution. The initial limit was equal to your karma, but I already had used more than 4x that many downvotes, so it was quickly changed to a limit of 4x your karma, since the intention was not to limit the downvoting power of existing users. I was annoyed because I had to change my voting policy, but I only had to gain a few hundred karma at that point to catch up. With the initial policy, I would have had to gain more karma than Eliezer had at the time, in order to downvote again.
Why limit the downvoting ability of people who have already proven unlikely to abuse that power? Why not just limit downvoted until you reach a certain point, like the twenty karma rule for adding main posts?
As compared to that, the current system trades “Established users might get limited in downvoting ability at very large numbers” for “Someone might get the requisite 20 karma and then pillage the site”.
It’s a pretty good tradeoff, but I still think I like your system better.
Downvotes you can make are limited to some multiple of your karma.
I didn’t know that..… How does that make sense?
The idea is mainly to keep new users from wrecking the site by downvoting everything. Since things tend to get upvoted over time, everyone who participates (and doesn’t seriously piss off the community) tends to get a slow trickle of karma even if they don’t post anything astounding.
It was a quick-fix sort of solution. The initial limit was equal to your karma, but I already had used more than 4x that many downvotes, so it was quickly changed to a limit of 4x your karma, since the intention was not to limit the downvoting power of existing users. I was annoyed because I had to change my voting policy, but I only had to gain a few hundred karma at that point to catch up. With the initial policy, I would have had to gain more karma than Eliezer had at the time, in order to downvote again.
Why limit the downvoting ability of people who have already proven unlikely to abuse that power? Why not just limit downvoted until you reach a certain point, like the twenty karma rule for adding main posts?
As compared to that, the current system trades “Established users might get limited in downvoting ability at very large numbers” for “Someone might get the requisite 20 karma and then pillage the site”.
It’s a pretty good tradeoff, but I still think I like your system better.