If you're so worried about downmods early in the life of a submission, how about this: Between P and P + H, where P is when the submission was Posted and H is

If you're so worried about downmods early in the life of a submission, how about this: Between P and P + H, where P is when the submission was Posted and H is some (constant?) number of hours, any downmods on the submission increment the downmod count but this has no effect whatsoever on the ranking. When we hit P + H, the downmods are made effective. An upmod on a story cancels a downmod. Then if a story has lots of inappropriate early downmods but is actually interesting, it will get high on the front page and the mass of legitimate upmods will cancel the illegitimate downmods. Showing the number of effective downmods (abs (- downmods upmods)) on a story might or might not be appropriate.