As recently (re-)suggested by Kaj Sotala, posts now have much larger effects on karma than comments: Each up or down vote on a post is worth 10 karma.
Negative votes on posts have had karma effects all along, but for some reason Reddit's code imposed a display cap (not an actual cap) of 0. This violates a basic user interface principle: things with important effects should have visible effects. Since this just got 10x more important, we now show negative post totals rather than "0". This also provides some feedback to posters that was previously missing. Note that downvoting a post costs 10 karma from your downvote cap of 4x current karma.
The minimum karma to start posting has been raised to 50.
Thanks to our friends at Tricycle for implementing this request!
Well... sorry to put it this way, but when you said that, I checked to see if you'd posted anything, and you hadn't. There's a rule I have which often offends people, and yet it seems like a very important rule, which is when someone tells you that change X will prevent people from doing Y, and they aren't doing Y, you probably want to check with people who are currently doing Y about that.
Take as a sample some of the people who have made nonmeta top-level posts in the past week or so and aren't super-regular posters. I count Shalmanese, David Balan, Matt, Mr. Hen, Warrigal, and JHuffman. A few of the posts I downvoted, but none was so abominably stupid that the person involved should be ridden out of town on a rail.
I looked up how long it took each of those posters to earn their 20 karma/50 karma based on comment points alone (not counting comments replying to their own posts). IE, how far do you have to go back for all comments between the... (read more)