The cheapest technical fix would probably be to prohibit voting on a comment after some time has passed, like some subreddits do. This would prevent karma gain from "interest" on old comments, but that probably wouldn't be too big a deal. More importantly, though, it wouldn't prevent ongoing retributive downvoting, which Eugine did (sometimes? I was never targeted) engage in -- only big one-time karma moves.
If we're looking for first steps, though, this is a place to start.
This would prevent karma gain from "interest" on old comments
If you want to reward having a long history of comments, you could prohibit only downvoting of old comments.
it wouldn't prevent ongoing retributive downvoting
I doubt you could algorithmically distinguish between downvoting a horticulture post because of disagreements about horticulture and downvoting a horticulture post because of disagreements about some other topic.
But I suspect voting rate limiters should keep the problem in check.
Thanks to the reaction to this article and some conversations, I'm convinced that it's worth trying to renovate and restore LW. Eliezer, Nate, and Matt Fallshaw are all on board and have empowered me as an editor to see what we can do about reshaping LW to meet what the community currently needs. This involves a combination of technical changes and social changes, which we'll try to make transparently and non-intrusively.
Technical Changes
Changes will be tracked as issues on the LW issue tracker here. Volunteer contributions very welcome and will be rewarded with karma, and if you'd like to be paid for spending a solid block of high-priority time on this get in touch with me. If you'd like to help, for now I recommend setting up a dev environment (as laid out here and here).
Some technical changes (links to the issues in the issue tracker):
--Nick_Tarleton
This is something I care about quite a bit! Ideally, the three people above would scrutinize every change and determine whether or not it's worthwhile. In practice, they're all extremely busy, and as I'm only very busy I've been deputized to handle whether or not change will be accepted. If you're unsure about a change, talk to me.
Trike still maintains the site, and so it's still a Trike dev's call when a change will make its way to production (or if it's too buggy to accept). We've got a turnaround time guarantee from Matt for any time-sensitive changes (which I imagine few changes will be).
Social Changes
The rationalist community is a different beast than it was years ago, and many people have shifted away from Less Wrong. Bringing them back needs to involve more than asking nicely, or the same problems will appear again.
Epistemic rationality will remain a core focus of LessWrong, and the sorts of confusion that you find elsewhere will continue to not fly here. But the forces that push people from Main to Discussion to Open Threads to other sites need to be explicitly counteracted.
One aspect is that just like emotion is part of rationality, informality is part of the rationalist community.
--Alicorn
Another aspect is dealing with the deepening and specializing interests of the community.
A third aspect is focusing on effective communication. One of the core determinants of professional and personal success is being able to communicate challenging topics and emotions effectively with other humans. The applications for both instrumental and epistemic rationality are clear, and explicitly seeking to cultivate this skill without losing the commitment to rationality will both make LW a more pleasant place to visit and (one hopes) allow LWers to win more in their lives. But this is a long project, whose details this paragraph is too short to contain. I don't have a current anticipated date for when I'll be ready to talk more about this.
I expect to edit this post over the coming days, and as I do, I'll make comments to highlight the changes. Thanks for reading!