zlacker

I think that part of the solution may be to introduce a feature that would give users that reach certain karma thresholds the ability to give more and more points to a comment when upvoting.

For example: a newbie would only be able to assign one point to a comment he's upvoting, but a user over a certain threshold could assign two points. The user that has even more karma (and is over the next threshold) could assign three points and so on. Users should be able to decide how many points they want to give to each comment.

The same should apply to downvotes. Prominent HN users should be able to make their downvotes "hurt more" if they want to.

Also, these thresholds could be used for "downvoting penalties". For example, a newbie would lose 4 points when downvoting, but a user over the first threshold would only lose three and so on. Users with karma above one of the thresholds would no longer lose karma when downvoting.

>>Sandma+(OP)
I've seen this feature in other communities and, given enough time, comments get +10 or 0 in a 0..10 scale. So in the end it's basically the same.

>>riledh+8
Perhaps you're right about this, but the main point was to give prominent users more power when upvoting and downvoting. The idea was to make upvotes and downvotes of those on http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders count more than the votes of newbies. The reason why I suggested that users should be able to decide how much points they want to assign when voting is because, there may be situations when you find a comment interesting, and want to upvote it, but not so insightful that you would give it your maximum amount of points.