As your comment stands now, you are just one point above the reply penalty threshold. You aren't a troll. I think it illustrates well that the problem with reply penalties isn't particularly strongly related to trolling. Since the penalty was introduced I have already twice refrained from answering a fairly resonable comment because the comment had less than -3 karma. I have seen no trollish comments for weeks.
Also, the thresholds for "simple majoritarianism" are usually required to be much higher in order to obtain intelligent results. No thresholds should be possible to be reached by three people. Three people could be goons who are being paid to interfere with the LW forum. That then means that if people are disinterested, or those goons are "johnny on the spot" (the one likely characteristic of the real life agents provocateurs I've encountered), then legitimate karma is lost.
Of course, karma itself has been abused on this site (and all o...
The recent implementation of a -5 karma penalty for replying to comments that are at -3 or below has clearly met with some disagreement and controversy. See http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/eb9/meta_karma_for_last_30_days/7aon . However, at the same time, it seems that Eliezer's observation that trolling and related problems have over time gotten worse here may be correct. It may be that this an inevitable consequence of growth, but it may be that it can be handled or reduced with some solution or set of solutions. I'm starting this discussion thread for people to propose possible solutions. To minimize anchoring bias and related problems, I'm not going to include my ideas in this header but in a comment below. People should think about the problem before reading proposed solutions (again to minimize anchoring issues).