Regarding #1, wow. That's a pretty remarkable insight.
Everyone thinks of the karma/reputation feedback mechanism in terms of how it promotes civil discourse, but in this case it's fairly remarkable to think of how it could be biasing the conversation toward a negative tone. Maybe it's usually civil negativity, but it's negative nonetheless. I can see how people would tire of this eventually.
I wonder if there'd be a simple way of limiting the bias? Slashdot's modpoint classes comes to mind, but then that opens a whole host of other problems...
Everyone thinks of the karma/reputation feedback mechanism in terms of how it promotes civil discourse, but in this case it's fairly remarkable to think of how it could be biasing the conversation toward a negative tone. Maybe it's usually civil negativity, but it's negative nonetheless. I can see how people would tire of this eventually.
I wonder if there'd be a simple way of limiting the bias? Slashdot's modpoint classes comes to mind, but then that opens a whole host of other problems...