[Fnoord]

> What if you added a downvote multiplier, so if you get 5 downvotes it becomes $.50? With a max neg of score of -10. And same for downvoter. And you get meta mods who watch these mods to try to keep things from wratcheting in a runaway manner.

$0.50 is a lot of money in some countries in the world. It'd make trolling vastly more expensive for people in those countries.

If you don't deal with the unpopular/controversial opinion getting downvoted problem it also devalues the unpopular/controversial opinions of those from those countries.

If you're $local_news_paper in some small US town the above is irrelevant, but NYT is read worldwide, as is HN and Reddit. (Tho I suppose Reddit more than HN.)

If you still wanna go ahead with your proposal, I think a good model on downvoting would be to see use it as currency with a relative cost plus an absolute base. E.g. absolute_base + 5%_of_current_karma. The relative cost is to avoid hoarding, the absolute cost is to avoid efficiency of karma depletion.