Interesting article. From my perspective HN voting, for the most part, works very well. I've been on online discussion groups since the days of USENET. HN is

Interesting article. From my perspective HN voting, for the most part, works very well. I've been on online discussion groups since the days of USENET. HN is great. What really bothers me is zero information down-votes and the "downvote army" as someone called it in this thread. Nobody learns anything from this at all. What's the value when a downvote carries no consequences whatsoever for the voter while delivering a penalty to the author? One idea I had a while ago is that a downvote should cost the person money in the form of karma. Want to down vote? It'll cost you ten points. No problem. The point of this idea is that a down-vote out of spite or just to pile on someone or an idea is a bad thing. People who behave that way with some consistency would have to give up more and more for each downvote. Paying for a downvote with karma could be an interesting evolutionary solution for downvote abuse, particularly if the cost increases based on a range of criteria. You downvote a comment on a thread and it cost you 10 karma, you continue to downvote the same author on the same thread and it cost you more each time. If people are piling one, the cost goes up. Etc.