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Give high-karma users more power to downvote: if you downvote a comment, click the now-red downvote button again to add e.g. <your karma>/500 extra_downvotes. At any time, a comment with extra_downvotes has min(#extra_downvotes, max(0, #points) / 2) fewer points than it would otherwise have.

Some examples:

- "good": tptacek likes something and gives +1 point - he has no more power than anyone else to upvote

- "bad": RiderofGiraffes downvotes for -1 point

- "crap": RiderofGiraffes thinks a comment at -2 is mean, and downvotes twice. The comment is now at -3, since extra_downvotes do nothing on comments with zero or fewer points.

- "popular crap": tptacek double-downvotes a 17-point comment to 8 points. Two 2000-point (top-1000?) double-downvoters could also get it to 8.

- "ridiculously popular crap": tptacek and RiderofGiraffes hate a 302-point comment. tptacek double-downvotes it to 176; RiderofGiraffes double-downvotes to 150 (half of #upvotes - #downvotes = 300); lots of others also lend their extra_downvotes. The comment stands at 150 and upvotes have half effect.

I think this proposal strikes a nice balance: users with high (500+) karma can better help keep the crap out; extremely-high-karma users get a bit more power (only a bit - realistically, tptacek will typically remove something like five points from a popular-but-crap comment since others also have extra_downvotes).

More importantly, "normal" users still run the site (that 150-point comment is still at the top of the page, and no amount of extra_downvotes is going to dislodge it). If you're going to cry "democracy", remember that the only current way of dealing with popular crap is [dead] - losing half your comment karma is not that harsh. And, again, people with lots of karma are apparently interesting.

Note that points and extra_downvotes must be tracked separately; otherwise, people would want to wait until a crap comment has gained some points to make their extra_downvotes more effective.

Finally, two tweaks: it may be a good idea to let only comment karma count for extra_downvotes purposes, and it may be a good idea to allow extra_downvotes on submissions.

It's a pity that no-one is going to see this comment...

[Note: HN handles used for illustration only, I'll happily remove them if you'd like.]




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