Hi David. Yes, we're going to move further in that direction. You probably noticed, to pick one example, that there have been almost no Ukraine/Crimea stories on the front page.
I doubt that we'll try to ban political stories altogether, partly because some (e.g. Snowden) do overlap with HN's core topics, but mainly because it's hard to define "political".
But "articles that get you riled up, but really don't lead to any productive or interesting discussions" is, to me, a narrower and clearer criterion that is pretty easy to apply fairly. PG has spoken about it in similar terms. I think we'll probably get more active about those. But we won't do anything major very quickly.
Here's another random idea. I think it would be more difficult to code up, but there are certain comments where I think "ok, this is a wrong answer, but in good faith". Those should get "pinned" at 0 karma. Other comments should get pinned at 1 - I wouldn't want to see them cross over into negative territory, but they aren't great either. I would envision this working by clicking a 1 or a 0, and as votes go up or down for the comment, my contribution changes as a consequence. Say I click 0 when it's at 1. It goes to 0. Others pile on, and it goes to -1. At that point my downvote actually becomes an upvote to push it back towards 0.
All those dynamic calculations would probably be a PITA, so I can completely understand something like that not seeing the light of day, but I just thought it was an interesting idea in terms of being able to say "ok, this is not a good comment, but it's not a mean one or anything, so it should have a floor under it".
I fear that would be hard to implement, but what you describe already happens informally to some extent: if people see an innocuous comment faded out, they sometimes upvote it to put it back in black. I like this and hope we can get the community to practice it more.
Conceptually it seems relatively simple: each voter supplies a "desired score", which would be +∞ and -∞ for regular upvotes and downvotes respectively, and 0 or other integers for those who want to be fancy. Then you can decide whether n is the correct score, or too high or too low, by assuming everyone wanting a number above n votes +1, everyone below n votes -1, and everyone who wants n votes -1, 0, or 1 as necessary to keep the score as n. (If k people wanted n, then if the score from everyone else is within [n-k, n+k], then n is the right score.) Updating the score one vote at a time seems doable. It would require storing the entire voting history with each comment, though, which would probably require changing things and be a pain.
Then the problem I see is with the user interface: most people wouldn't want to use it, and it would clutter things up (a numeric input field, or a specialized "vote towards 0" button). I guess it could be a setting that individual users could enable. I'd hazard a guess it would be deemed not worth the trouble.
I have the impression that posts are more heavily downvoted now that the comment score is hidden.
It was rare to see comments become unreadable as it is now the case. I suppose that seeing the score allowed users to consider a given score as a sufficient punishment, and refrained from burying others deeper.
Maybe you could display the score when it's negative (that info is already conveyed by the shade of the text, but it is not quantitative)... or maybe cap the negative scale?
Some newbies make mistakes out of cluelessness, and by the time someone tells them to read the rules their total karma is way below zero. That's pretty harsh.
I doubt that we'll try to ban political stories altogether, partly because some (e.g. Snowden) do overlap with HN's core topics, but mainly because it's hard to define "political".
But "articles that get you riled up, but really don't lead to any productive or interesting discussions" is, to me, a narrower and clearer criterion that is pretty easy to apply fairly. PG has spoken about it in similar terms. I think we'll probably get more active about those. But we won't do anything major very quickly.