As I understand the Karma system, you're supposed to upvote intelligent, methodical, readable and original articles, since the point of the Karma system is to provide evidence to other readers that the post (and poster) in question is interesting. That is, you're not supposed to upvote based on whether you agree with the conclusions. The same goes for downvotes, obviously: you shouldn't downvote articles or posts simply because you don't like the conclusions.
Still, I think that happens quite a lot. I got four downvotes within a short time-span a few hours ago on this post and it's comments (people who agreed with me were also were downvoted): http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jo8/private_currency_to_generate_funds_for_effective/ Now I don't claim that my post and comments are master-pieces by any means, but I don't really see that they're so sub-par from the first point of view as to deserve a stream of down-votes. My suggestion is that some people don't like the conclusions and therefore downvote it.
I think people have a problem distinguishing these two things (in fact, I think it's a universal human trait and that very few people are able to fight their bias against posts containing conclusions they don't like successfully). If so, it might be a good idea to give two sorts of Karma: "conclusions-based Karma" and "argument-based Karma". Personally, I think it is the argument-based downvotes that count and that I wouldn't look so much at others' conclusion-based Karma, but it might still be useful to have it so as to make it salient that the quality of an argument is distinct from whether you like the conclusion or not.
Another idea is to force people to give arguments for their votes. Of course you couldn't do that with every vote but if someone has a very unusual voting pattern, I think it might be a good idea that that person would have to explain his or her votes.
My tentative opinion is nevertheless that the Karma system does more good than harm, but that it should be improved.
That is, you're not supposed to upvote based on whether you agree with the conclusions. The same goes for downvotes, obviously: you shouldn't downvote articles or posts simply because you don't like the conclusions.
I'd guess you differ from a lot of LW here. I definitely disagree with what I've quoted...although I won't downvote you for that!
It's good to downvote comments that are flagrantly wrong or misleading, and to upvote cogent comments, and sometimes that's going to amount to downvoting because I disagree, or upvoting because I agree. Sometimes th...
To whoever has for the last several days been downvoting ~10 of my old comments per day:
It is possible that your intention is to discourage me from commenting on Less Wrong.
The actual effect is the reverse. My comments still end up positive on average, and I am therefore motivated to post more of them in order to compensate for the steady karma drain you are causing.
If you are mass-downvoting other people, the effect on some of them is probably the same.
To the LW admins, if any are reading:
Look, can we really not do anything about this behaviour? It's childish and stupid, and it makes the karma system less useful (e.g., for comment-sorting), and it gives bad actors a disproportionate influence on Less Wrong. It seems like there are lots of obvious things that would go some way towards helping, many of which have been discussed in past threads about this.
Failing that, can we at least agree that it's bad behaviour and that it would be good in principle to stop it or make it more visible and/or inconvenient?
Failing that, can we at least have an official statement from an LW administrator that mass-downvoting is not considered an undesirable behaviour here? I really hope this isn't the opinion of the LW admins, but as the topic has been discussed from time to time with never any admin response I've been thinking it increasingly likely that it is. If so, let's at least be honest about it.
To anyone else reading this:
If you should happen to notice that a sizeable fraction of my comments are at -1, this is probably why. (Though of course I may just have posted a bunch of silly things. I expect it happens from time to time.)
My apologies for cluttering up Discussion with this. (But not very many apologies; this sort of mass-downvoting seems to me to be one of the more toxic phenomena on Less Wrong, and I retain some small hope that eventually something may be done about it.)