It was explained that the [well, a] main purpose of downvoting is to cause "bad" comments to be hidden from view, rather than to punish the writer. When I asked in another thread for an explanation of downvoting to very low scores under this model, it was explained that this is done to offset the risk of people voting up the posts after the downvoters are no longer paying attention to the thread.
One way to change the system that might mitigate these factors would be to allow for "soft" downvotes that don't subtract from the karma of the author of the post until the post gets upvoted past a certain threshold. Another would be to limit, reduce, or eliminate the contribution to karma of negative-scored posts (if it is limited to -2, this is equivalent to making all downvotes "soft" under the first proposal)
If the only function is to silence the writer, than the system doesn't make that much sense at all. Beyond the twenty points needed to prove trustworthy, karma only serves as emotional satisfaction. This is clearly intended as incentive be mindful of what you post. There would be no reason for people to accumulate thousands of points. Maybe there could be a system of likes and dislikes, as well as a system of up or downvotes.
Up and down are only to be used in regard to rationality, and they'll be limited. These votes would be on display to show whether or...
The next discussion thread is here.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 84. The previous thread has passed 500 comments. Comment in the 14th thread until you read chapter 84.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.
As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: