I don't want to pay just because people disagree with me though. For instance, I've had relatively innocuous comments get downvoted on Reddit because it's an unpopular opinion. A great way to get downvotes is to find a thread where people are complaining about speed locks in apps and post "studies have shown that distracted driving is at least as dangerous as drinking and driving."

You'll almost instantly get downvoted to at least -5, despite the verifiable truth of the statement.

It would make vote brigading really attractive as well. Imagine if /r/TheDonald users could have caused a financial impact to anyone just by downvoting their comments. Reddit would have been a nightmare.

> What if you added a downvote multiplier, so if you get 5 downvotes it becomes $.50? With a max neg of score of -10. And same for downvoter. And you get meta mods who watch these mods to try to keep things from wratcheting in a runaway manner.

$0.50 is a lot of money in some countries in the world. It'd make trolling vastly more expensive for people in those countries.

If you don't deal with the unpopular/controversial opinion getting downvoted problem it also devalues the unpopular/controversial opinions of those from those countries.

If you're $local_news_paper in some small US town the above is irrelevant, but NYT is read worldwide, as is HN and Reddit. (Tho I suppose Reddit more than HN.)

If you still wanna go ahead with your proposal, I think a good model on downvoting would be to see use it as currency with a relative cost plus an absolute base. E.g. absolute_base + 5%_of_current_karma. The relative cost is to avoid hoarding, the absolute cost is to avoid efficiency of karma depletion.

Some industrial scale trolling, perhaps.

On the other hand, trolls and coordinated political campaigns tend to be a lot more willing to spend money to pursue their causes than people that just want to add a relevant anecdote or express their approval, so it might skew the balance of comments more towards trolling and brigading.