Our friends at Tricycle will push through a zero-based karma system (no self-voting possible) sometime this evening. At present this will only cover future posts/comments - they may go back and revise history some time in the indefinite future (or not), but apparently that would be overly complicated for now. We'll see how this works.
Then it should be possible to see how many down votes I've cast, to know how many are left. In practice, I expect that the number of downvotes is significantly less than the amount of Karma, but I'm not sure. If this is true, then the limitation is roughly equivalent to simply prohibiting people with Karma less than a threshold to downvote.
I would assume you can only cast as many up votes as your karma value, too?
I'm not sure what the change accomplishes. Was there a thread on this I missed?
ETA: capping the up votes similarly will produce bad effects. :) But I'm still worried this tells legitimate lurkers "contribute written comments or we don't want to know when you think a comment/post is poor!"
Our friends at Tricycle will push through a zero-based karma system (no self-voting possible) sometime this evening. At present this will only cover future posts/comments - they may go back and revise history some time in the indefinite future (or not), but apparently that would be overly complicated for now. We'll see how this works.