Hi! It's me.
You may meet me at LWCW.
Aiming to improve the quality of threads by telling users to post/comment less in a public forum seems to me like it's not going to be very helpful in the long term. If users self-select by simulating how much karma their post/comment gets (perhaps via extrapolating the average karma ratio of their previous posts) it might work for a subset, but will fail for other cases:
Namely:
As you said yourself, it only takes a few seconds to upvote - so it does to downvote. I would expect the system to converge to lower quality comments being voted down more so the observed quality of the comment will roughly align with the votes on the comment.
If the system does not allow you to filter out comments that are below some downvote/upvote ratio, then perhaps the system needs to be tweaked to allow this kind of filtering - but the solution is not telling users to post less. (And if someone is serially creating low quality content, this person can usually be approached individually, rather than trying to optimize for the public forum.)
This seems worthwhile to care about for two reasons:
(edit: improved the first paragraph to better articulate what I mean to say.)
I liked your post.
Tangential, but I'd be interested to hear/read more about this. I have similar feelings but thoughts around this are very disorganized and blurry, rather than well laid out and clear.