Spite exists, and people do things out of spite. That doesn't mean punishment shouldn't exist. If you don't stop being friends with anyone ever you will be abused and used and forced to spend time with awful people.

Total karma isn't for you, it's for everyone else.

Intentionally or not you just described the karma system at fool.com (which they call recommendations). As a long time poster there it does have its uses: there are some extremely prolix boards where I skip through reading only the high rec posts, and don't have to worry about being "shielded" from controversial ideas like you get with the system here.

If i were putting someone else's karma system in here, I would put in stackexchange.com They have downvoting, but it costs the downvoter karma. So you don't get things mindlessly downvoted just because they don't kowtow. But actual low quality stuff is downvoted by high-karma individuals.

The recent improvement of showing pctage of downvotes here is nice. I think I would go the last step and "decorate" the up and down vote buttons with the total number of existing up and down votes. This would also be slightly more compact than the current system where I have points reported on top of comment, and then uninformative buttons below the post. And I would by scanning upvote totals be able to use recs in the way you want them used, if I wanted to ignore downvotes.

Users should never be kicked out. Downvotes shouldn't exist.

The issues you are raising have been thoroughly aired here in the past. It isn't helpful to barge in and propose rearranging the furniture just because you don't see why it is the way it is. For some of the background I suggest this posting. There is certainly room for useful discussion of how LessWrong should be run, but it has to start from where it is.

Baring extreme scenarios, a system of upvotes should sort everything out.

Right.

Which meaning of "should" is that?

Now. I've written the above on the hypothesis that you are not exactly what you call yourself, a troll. But the evidence is not favourable. You pre-emptively shot yourself in the foot by choosing that handle, posted a bio consisting of a list of what are hurrah keywords on LessWrong, accumulated some karma with innocuous postings, then started posting stuff that instantly gets downvoted out of sight.

If you are genuine, you need to change something. That is not something that I will say twice.