The HN karma paradox
gojomo: The problem is that a single upvote-downvote axis has to capture two different, sometimes orthogonal, judgments: (1) is this comment valuable or detrimental to the discussion?; and (2) do I agree or disagree with this comment?This entanglement is unavoidable as long as there's only one score per comment, given the interface and established practice, at HN and similar sites.It might work to have a second axis/score that's specifically agree/disagree. (This could take the form of left-agree and right-disagree arrows, perhaps on the right of the comment-meta-line.) Then a comment could be be wildly agreed-with without offering a karmic windfall to repetitions of obvious popular sentiments, or wildly disagreed-with without the current undercurrents of censorship (sinking/fading-out) and karmic punishment via disagreement-downvotes.Personally, I would expect to find the comments with both net upvotes (valuable) and rightvotes (disagreement) to be most interesting -- because they capture challenging minority viewpoints, but well-presented.