There was a time when "average karma" on your recent posts influenced your ranking. This was explicitly mentioned by pg at one point. However, dang has recentl

There was a time when "average karma" on your recent posts influenced your ranking. This was explicitly mentioned by pg at one point. However, dang has recently stated that avg karma has been removed and wasn't used for much anyway. So who knows? That being said, downvoting due to disagreement is currently deeply harmful to this site, but the mods seem to be fine with it. Since that's their stance, I've taken to being quite liberal in my use of downvotes. If that's the way it is, it's dumb not to do the same.