The minimum karma needed to make a top level post needs to be raised. My reasons are in the meta thread here. To summarize: the low karma requirement combined with the 10x bonus means that newish users will make top level posts, not do a good job their first time and (with −3) end up with a negative karma total. In frustration they will leave.
Also, it’s more fun if top level posting power is a little hard to win.
A cap isn’t ridiculous, but comments sometimes get hammered nearly that much. It should always be riskier to try a top level post than a comment. −50 sounds closer to right to me.
I think what I was trying to avoid was new users being hammered into the negative more than finding the appropriate maximum karma penalty. So if we go with −50 as the top level post max loss, the posting karma threshold should be 50.
Sounds like a plan to me… Although, do we want to take into account that unpopular top-level posts often have beneath them many downvoted comments by the same author who’s trying to defend the unpopular idea?
While we’re talking about these issues:
The minimum karma needed to make a top level post needs to be raised. My reasons are in the meta thread here. To summarize: the low karma requirement combined with the 10x bonus means that newish users will make top level posts, not do a good job their first time and (with −3) end up with a negative karma total. In frustration they will leave.
Also, it’s more fun if top level posting power is a little hard to win.
It was actually raised to 50, then changed back. I’ll do a quick poll:
Upvote this post if you support moving it back to 50.
Upvote this post if you support keeping it at 20.
I think it might be better to cap karma losses from top level posts at −20.
A cap isn’t ridiculous, but comments sometimes get hammered nearly that much. It should always be riskier to try a top level post than a comment. −50 sounds closer to right to me.
I think what I was trying to avoid was new users being hammered into the negative more than finding the appropriate maximum karma penalty. So if we go with −50 as the top level post max loss, the posting karma threshold should be 50.
Sounds like a plan to me… Although, do we want to take into account that unpopular top-level posts often have beneath them many downvoted comments by the same author who’s trying to defend the unpopular idea?