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Correct me if I'm wrong, but if that pattern is sustainably observed, then it almost certainly means the upvote/downvote privileges should be changed, correct?

Elsewise, the pattern will continue like entropy, until the majority of comments are like that.

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There already are certain privileges to karma: you need a certain threshold to downvote comments at all, and I suspect that thresholds to get onto the front page are based on the karma of who upvotes your story. (There've been times where my upvote alone, going from 2 to 3 votes, is enough to get something on the front page, while many times I've seen new stories with 4-5 points that don't make it.) I suspect PG is thinking of tweaking the weights, automatically, until there's enough of a weight to high-karma downvotes to kill bad comments. You could easily train an SVM or other classifier on some set good/bad comments and then pull out the coefficients to figure out what signals should go into weighting point totals.

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