From the previous discussions of this, I still maintain that a possibly minor code change would be worth investigating to reduce the moderator load: only allow upvotes to affect user karma, instead of both upvotes and downvotes. The overwhelming complaints seem to be not so much that comments are downvoted, but that user karma can drop precipitously as a result of a downvoting campaign. Preventing negative votes from affecting karma greatly reduces that.
Where we disagree is interesting for discussion's sake; where we agree is interesting for community building.
That said, I don't have a clear idea on whether we need to do something about 'inability to post due to negative karma' if this change is implemented.
Since the episode with Eugine_Nier, I have received three private messages from different people asking me to investigate various cases of suspected mass downvoting. And to be quite honest, I don't want to deal with this. Eugine's case was relatively clear-cut, since he had engaged in systematic downvoting of a massive scale, but the new situations are a lot fuzzier and I'm not sure of what exactly the rules should be (what counts as a permitted use of the downvote system and what doesn't?).
At least one person has also privately contacted me and offered to carry out moderator duties if I don't want them, but even if I told them yes (on what basis? why them and not someone else?), I don't know what kind of policy I should tell them to enforce. I only happened to be appointed a moderator because I was in the list of top 10 posters at a particular time, and I don't feel like I should have any particular authority to make the rules. Nor do I feel like I have any good idea of what the rules should be, or who would be the right person to enforce them.
In any case, I don't want to be doing this job, nor do I particularly feel like being responsible for figuring out who should, or how, or what the heck. I've already started visiting LW less often because I dread having new investigation requests to deal with. So if you folks could be so kind as to figure it out without my involvement? If there's a clear consensus that someone in particular should deal with this, I can give them mod powers, or something.