zlacker

Karma breeds elitism. But low or negative karma individuals may preserve diversity, preventing fitness plateau, stagnation and, as you suggest, perhaps decline.

Would be nice to be able to fork HN, like git, with parameters of the forkers choosing. Kind of a deme model, where you could possibly merge your fork back into HN if it had enough meta-karma.

An example of a simple fork, would be to limit posting to once per user per thread. This might concentrate the contribution of certain overactive users? Would be good to be able to run the experiment, in a fork, and abandon if it was not fruitful.

Another fork might be a PG-free zone, deus abscondicus... this might prevent the suppression of dissent? Because users would not use votes to magnetically align with the Founder.