It seems a shame to me that a couple guys saying hi to one another got downvoted into oblivion. I've noticed a lot of downvoters piling on lately. I'm going to see if I can tweak voting to prevent this.
One thing I tried (released yesterday) is more aggressive graying out of negative comments, in the hope that people wouldn't be so prone to downvote something they could no longer read. I also increased the threshold for downarrows to appear. Neither of those helped in this case, though.
So for now it's back to the drawing board-- or rather, vi. I'll write some code to analyze voting patterns and see if there is some way sw could distinguish mean downvoting from e.g. the downvoting of trolls and spammers.
Have you thought about just putting a floor on downvoting?
It seems anything that truly merits a -10 is firmly in 'getting killed by an editor' territory, with possible account deletion, and, if there were a floor, anything that doesn't deserve a -10 would not get modded into oblivion for no reason.
Maybe you don't want to change the modding system that much, but I was just wondering if you had any thoughts on the idea?
