Leave the point system intact behind the scenes, as is.
Collect the set of comments with a positive score.
For threads with < N positive comments comments, don't show anything
When there are >= N positive comments, show a percentile rank within that set. In the event of a tie, assign both comments the higher percentile (ie. "92% of the positive comments in this thread have equal or fewer points than this comment)
My initial guess at N would be 10. Anything less and the percentiles are somewhat meaningless and not really needed, as it's easy to skim.
The benefit of this approach: It's now a relative scale. Down voting no longer means "I don't like this" it means "the majority of other comments are better than this one". The net result will be less absolute value points for the best comments, as they will stall once they reach 90+% and they will receive far more down votes. However, there is now a community incentive to collectively sort the comment set, rather than award points.
Well some ask HN threads could easily have one or two good answers which shuts down the thread. This would break the <n positive comments rule.
You could have <(n positive comments/total comments) as a work around perhaps.
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The thing is that all mathematical rules end up being terrible at specific edge cases which are better served by another set of rules. In my opinion, the best possible use of mathematical rules are ones which are simplistic and easy to follow. Leave the rest up to the quality of the community.
(There is a different set of changes to cues and layout, which control social/behavioral action - such as removing the vote count, which I am not targeting.)
Leave the point system intact behind the scenes, as is.
Collect the set of comments with a positive score.
For threads with < N positive comments comments, don't show anything
When there are >= N positive comments, show a percentile rank within that set. In the event of a tie, assign both comments the higher percentile (ie. "92% of the positive comments in this thread have equal or fewer points than this comment)
My initial guess at N would be 10. Anything less and the percentiles are somewhat meaningless and not really needed, as it's easy to skim.
The benefit of this approach: It's now a relative scale. Down voting no longer means "I don't like this" it means "the majority of other comments are better than this one". The net result will be less absolute value points for the best comments, as they will stall once they reach 90+% and they will receive far more down votes. However, there is now a community incentive to collectively sort the comment set, rather than award points.