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!
That's just considering the effects of you having the awesome exponential downvote power. Would LW look much different if everyone had it?
It seems to me that the current system works pretty well. In general, posts at -2 aren't worth reading, and there isn't much drama associated with downvoting.
I think so. Consider a controversial post that three people really love and three people really hate. It would be at 0 without the exponential downvote power, but very negative with it. The effect would be to make LW blander by silencing posts that offend a small number of people.