Negative karma undermines online reputation systems

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

I’ve been annoyed by anonymous downvoting over at Hacker News, so I can agree with this:

It’s not a good idea to combine positive and negative inputs in a single public karma score. Say you encounter a user with 75 karma points and another with 69 karma points. Who is more trustworthy? You can’t tell: maybe the first user used to have hundreds of good points but recently accumulated a lot of negative ones, while the second user has never received a negative point at all. If you must have public negative reputation, handle it as a separate score (as in the eBay seller feedback pattern).