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!
It is a valid question. I suspect the downvotes were in lieu of the valid answer, which is 'no'.
The Karma system was drastically altered and seeing the karma numbers jump around by up to an order of magnitude (well, technically more...) is somewhat surprising. It would be confusing if the change notice was hidden away in a mostly ignored thread.
And yet, of all those who downvoted, not one took the time to actually provide that valid answer.
The post currently sits at -2 according to my latest refresh. It seems other readers agree - we don't want to see a meta submission like this at the top-level.
Agreed. LW needs a blog or something to list recent updates and give heads-ups about these kinds of things. Reddit does that, and it works well. This post neither belongs in the new/promoted feed, nor in the meta-thread (despite what I appeared to suggest in my original comment) - the former is inelegant and the latter impractical.