I have noticed that high-quality comments are still voted up pretty well, and while some witty banter gets a rocket ride too it's not unbearable. This communit

I have noticed that high-quality comments are still voted up pretty well, and while some witty banter gets a rocket ride too it's not unbearable. This community has been over variations of this topic quite a few times. The conclusion I drew from reading those discussions was that telling people how you think they should behave, and expecting it to actually happen, is not going to work (regardless of the quality of your argument and/or the population). I've wondered for a while about the effectiveness of two different 'scoring' ideas. One is to make downvoting beyond some threshold (-1, perhaps) cost one or more point of karma for each downvote -- so if you really feel the need to drive something into the dirt, you have to give up some of your own karma as pennance for your obvious lack of self control and inability to follow the site guidelines. The other is to give up on global karma, and split the voting mechanism into categories such as 'agree/disagree', 'signal/noise', etc., so there are mechanisms to express a handful of the different reasons people have for voting. Just thinking out loud...