So far no one has done an analysis on the data set of all registered accounts.
This. And This
Why? Because we will run out of bits?
And This
There is a useful distinction to be made between someone starting out at 0 karma or just breaking even and someone running a negative score.
It's proposed to spend coding resources solving a hypothetical "problem" for newbies whose first posts result in negative karma.
Have we determined that this is a problem for any significant number of people?
Moreover, with all the squawk about signal to noise, shouldn't we want to cause problems for such people? The negative karma imposed some...
It came to my attention that when you receive downvotes for your comments, your karma goes negative and you need to "pay back" to be able to post to Discussion or to Main.
Since new users start with zero karma, having negative karma seems to just encourage those with negative karma to create a new account. We don't want to encourage people to create superfluous accounts, do we? Therefore I think LessWrong codebase should be patched so that karma does not go below zero even with lots of downvotes.
What do you think?