Another possibility would be to implement a waiting period before people have the opportunity to vote. This may help with the issue of newer members upvoting the one line witty comments. However, I am not sure if the short comments are necessarily negative. Should users be required to contribute exceptionally long and verbose posts without the benefit of shorter posts in between? From my own perspective, I tend to only skim over 'wall of text' comments if they do not engage my interests from the beginning so the intermingling of short comments with longer comments to me is not a bad thing. The voting up or down of comments from those that may be deemed inadequate to accurately judge the quality of the post (new members) seems to be more of an issue. These new users may vote based on their opinions (as I mentioned in another post) rather than on the quality of the arguments or information presented so a probation period may be the solution.
(I was going to include this as an edit to my previous post, but it really needs its own comment post.) I created a site with a Karma based system. The Karma was actually transferred from person to person, though. Everyone started with 0 Karma, and only the administrator could feed Karma into the system. The users could transfer to each other, but as they gave Karma they would lose Karma. A potential benefit is that the administrator can feed Karma into the system by rewarding people that contribute based on particular topics as chosen by the administrator. I am not sure if this would be a good idea for this site, but I am simply stating it to get the ideas flowing for other solutions. I really like the way the site operates even if there are potentials for abuse or inaccuracies.
Also, not related to the topic so much, I find it funny that I often see people say "I do not care about points." but are also the most likely people to make suggestions about new ways to implement the points system.
Another option would be to have a hidden karma impact on sorting. Keeping a hidden score based on the log(karma) of the up voters might dilute the impact of people until they have been around for a while and help maintain the current culture without ignoring new opinions.
Comments
I've thought of considering comment length in the sorting algorithm. There's definitely a correlation between length and quality.
Another possibility would be to look at the words people used. I'm pretty sure you could train a spam filter to recognize lame comments.
Another possibility would be to implement a waiting period before people have the opportunity to vote. This may help with the issue of newer members upvoting the one line witty comments. However, I am not sure if the short comments are necessarily negative. Should users be required to contribute exceptionally long and verbose posts without the benefit of shorter posts in between? From my own perspective, I tend to only skim over 'wall of text' comments if they do not engage my interests from the beginning so the intermingling of short comments with longer comments to me is not a bad thing. The voting up or down of comments from those that may be deemed inadequate to accurately judge the quality of the post (new members) seems to be more of an issue. These new users may vote based on their opinions (as I mentioned in another post) rather than on the quality of the arguments or information presented so a probation period may be the solution.
Another possibility would be to look at the words people used. I'm pretty sure you could train a spam filter to recognize lame comments.
I think you are onto something here.
(I was going to include this as an edit to my previous post, but it really needs its own comment post.) I created a site with a Karma based system. The Karma was actually transferred from person to person, though. Everyone started with 0 Karma, and only the administrator could feed Karma into the system. The users could transfer to each other, but as they gave Karma they would lose Karma. A potential benefit is that the administrator can feed Karma into the system by rewarding people that contribute based on particular topics as chosen by the administrator. I am not sure if this would be a good idea for this site, but I am simply stating it to get the ideas flowing for other solutions. I really like the way the site operates even if there are potentials for abuse or inaccuracies.
Also, not related to the topic so much, I find it funny that I often see people say "I do not care about points." but are also the most likely people to make suggestions about new ways to implement the points system.
Another option would be to have a hidden karma impact on sorting. Keeping a hidden score based on the log(karma) of the up voters might dilute the impact of people until they have been around for a while and help maintain the current culture without ignoring new opinions.