If the goal is that people should not be punished, how about the rule “do not downvote into negative score”. That way it can never cost karma to post here, but people can still adjust the score of a recommendation downwards. If only positive votes are allowed, the scores will over-value controversial recommendations.
If a high-scoring, highly controversial recommendation gets in such a situation, it means it got enough attention to be controversial and reached quite a few people, and is giving us some nice data on who likes what and how the LW population stands on this, assuming there’s some kind of written feedback. I think that data is probably worth the karmic difference.
If the goal is that people should not be punished, how about the rule “do not downvote into negative score”. That way it can never cost karma to post here, but people can still adjust the score of a recommendation downwards. If only positive votes are allowed, the scores will over-value controversial recommendations.
I think this almost cancels out.
If a high-scoring, highly controversial recommendation gets in such a situation, it means it got enough attention to be controversial and reached quite a few people, and is giving us some nice data on who likes what and how the LW population stands on this, assuming there’s some kind of written feedback. I think that data is probably worth the karmic difference.