There should be fast tracks that present no practical limits to the new users. First few comments should be available immediately upon registration, possibly regenerating quickly. This should only degrade if there is downvoting or no upvoting, and the limits should go away completely according to an algorithm that passes backtesting on first comments made by users in good standing who started commenting within the last 3-4 years. That is, if hypothetically such a rate-limiting algorithm were to be applied 3 years ago to a user who started commenting then, who later became a clearly good contributor, the algorithm should succeed in (almost) never preventing that user from making any of the comments that were actually made, at the rate they were actually made.
If backtesting shows that this isn’t feasible, implementing this feature is very bad. Crowdsource moderation instead, allow high-Karma users to rate-limit-vote on new users, but put rate-limit-level of new users to “almost unlimited” by default, until rate-limit-downvoted manually.
There should be fast tracks that present no practical limits to the new users. First few comments should be available immediately upon registration, possibly regenerating quickly. This should only degrade if there is downvoting or no upvoting, and the limits should go away completely according to an algorithm that passes backtesting on first comments made by users in good standing who started commenting within the last 3-4 years. That is, if hypothetically such a rate-limiting algorithm were to be applied 3 years ago to a user who started commenting then, who later became a clearly good contributor, the algorithm should succeed in (almost) never preventing that user from making any of the comments that were actually made, at the rate they were actually made.
If backtesting shows that this isn’t feasible, implementing this feature is very bad. Crowdsource moderation instead, allow high-Karma users to rate-limit-vote on new users, but put rate-limit-level of new users to “almost unlimited” by default, until rate-limit-downvoted manually.