It's not clear to me that "number of upvotes minus number of downvotes" is a meaningful measure of anything, whether its displayed or not. An upvote from a high

It's not clear to me that "number of upvotes minus number of downvotes" is a meaningful measure of anything, whether its displayed or not. An upvote from a high-quality user should count for more than one from a low-quality user. If you consider the graph of comments and users, where each vote is an edge from a user to a comment, and there is an edge from each comment to whoever wrote it, I bet there would be interesting information to be found in the eigenvectors.