Or are we aiming for blandness here?
I've recently been voted into the lighter shades for calling out questionable ideology in an article. Even though it was not even a popular news item, I got at least eight or nine downvotes, and still ended up at +2 after waiting a day. That's because other people who read my comment decided to upvote (or at least anti-downvote), as I am wont to do when I see this kind of thing going on.
I also think, you as viewer should at least be able to choose if you want to order by "goodness" (upvotes-downvotes) or by "controversiality"/"interest" (upvotes+downvotes).
Thankfully there are a handful of us here who will upvote to counter the "for the lulz" type downvotes even if we don't always agree with the point of view of the comment itself, but I've noticed this forum (like all Internet forums eventually do) is slowly succumbing to the lowest common denominator crowd.
Seems this has two problems. One is promoting highly-voted on comments only encourages more voting, ensuring those comments stay at the top. Two is that extremely downvoted comments would be raised to the top, regardless of upvotes. It may prove to surface spam, trolling, or other nasties.
Customisable, domainable "reddit as a service" should really exist with custom templates etc. ala shopify.
