I paid 5 karma for making this comment. But if everyone in the subthread had to pay 5 karma, or if people below 1000 karma couldn't participate at all, then this thread would be much smaller. Comments of minor significance, like this one and others, would probably not exist. This ceteris paribus I would see as a loss.

I have taken at least 3 karma hits to talk about this.

or does it turn out that we're just incentivizing being quick on the trigger

Or worse, if someone wants to reply to a comment at -3, they will first upvote it to -2 just to avoid the penalty.

Meta-discussion is also a horrible slime-dripping cancer on a forum

Meta-discussion has to occur on fora if fora are going to function. It may be that non-functioning fora have more meta-discussion, but there are obvious correlation v. causation issues.

I agreed with this as a general principle strongly enough to pay a 5 karma penalty to say so. I don't think it should be as down voted as it is.

I can't recall having ever participated in a forum or blog and have the pay offs of meta-discussion be higher than discussing something else. More problematically it is way too engaging than it should be and is an attention sink.

A web developer volunteered to help improve the site. Sorry that the link to the volunteer offer goes to a slime-dripping cancer meta thread, but that is where it happens to be. The link. drinks a chaser for my -5 karma points

I'm proceeding to answer anyway. I have karma to burn.

Does the karma subtraction happen if for answers to comments which are -3 or below when the comment is posted, or does that -5 cost come and go depending on the karma of the comment being answered? Or is the loss permanent regardless of what the karma of the comment being answered becomes?

I'd love to have a way to move comments. If anyone's willing to donate enough money, this site could hire a full-time programmer and have all kinds of amazing new features. Meanwhile the development resources just don't exist.

How much would part-time or one-off single feature development work cost? If you are going to tell the public that a problem is easily solved with money, you should aim to give the public a sense of the problem’s scope.

That it's difficult to do this right is not an argument for doing it poorly. My point is that it'll have a negative effect on net if implemented without thread-moving, with the correct goal of discouraging bad conversations getting obscured by the problem I've pointed out. Only if the problem is mitigated (by thread-moving or something else) will it be a good idea to implement what you suggest. If it can't be mitigated with available resources, then nothing more should be done for now.

There seems to be a significant amount of people who browse with anti-kibitzer and full-unhide.

If you want us to stop using such option combinations, maybe putting a warning into preferences would be a reasonable first step?