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 cost on the guy. Why is that a bad thing?
And note how this "fix" would mask a troll, making his karma indistinguishable from a complete newbie. That's a more serious theoretical issue than some newbie in a tizzy over how he would wipe out his -2 karma and start again from scratch.
This nonfix "solves" a trivial problem for a set of users we probably want to cause more problems for, and introduces a serious hole for trolls.
Bad idea.
And note how this "fix" would mask a troll, making his karma indistinguishable from a complete newbie.
Total karma scores still don't display below zero, although monthly karma scores do. If you want to know whether a person's karma score is zero or negative, and if so, how negative, you have to look at the scores on their comments. The current system is designed to make negative karma a burden that keeps people from posting beyond a brief reversal in conduct, without publicly displaying just how much the person in question has been downvoted.
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?