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Comment by abraininavat | Hacker News Reader

You've simply assumed that engaged users are less likely to vote up fatuous vitriol. That remains to be shown and I'm skeptical.

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In another thread not long ago PG stated that this was exactly the case on a few comments he found vitriolic. If he measured the votes of only high-karma users, the comments would have been negative. You can search through his history to find his report on the subject (it was around three weeks ago, IIRC).

Here's the thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5936055

To be clear: what he's saying in this thread seems to support the idea of a karma-limited feature for showing comments. The score (not the content) on a comment would have been negative; the comment, in context, was a superficial negative comment that commanded the top spot on a thread.

At the very least, the intuition seems to me that if you have a high enough karma score, you've learned by example what is an acceptable and unacceptable comment and know how to compose comments that are acceptable, and should be able to tell the difference. Beyond that, if you set the knob high enough, you're going to capture people who have been around for a while and have been able to witness the rise of the pendants and armchair-experts compared to yesteryear so won't dismiss these things as "normal."

If this is the case, a good optimisation might be to weight the value of a vote according to the karma of the person casting that vote. This seems like a simple idea to me, and I don't know if it's used elsewhere, so please forgive me if I'm being a bit naive here!

This was one of the options discussed in the thread tptacek linked to.

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