Wise words. I should've said '..if it is not very hard to implement a fix we might as well...'
It's reasonable to conclude "if this is a potential problem, and it's easy to solve, we should implement that solution assuming the solution does not cause other problems." But negative karma was deliberately implemented to keep disruptive individuals from continually posting after being heavily downvoted. To my knowledge, while there are people who've created sockpuppet accounts, the issue of someone creating a sockpuppet to get around negative karma has not yet come up (and if it has, the people doing it managed to create a sufficiently clean b...
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?