It's amazing how voting gets pretty complex, pretty fast.<p>Although, these are more ballot-based, I remember reading about this in my discrete math class (in high school!):<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem</a>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system</a><p>I second a couple of people's comments about how it's very cool PG is constantly trying to improve the system. I've sometimes read his comments (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg</a>), and one can tell he really cares about the level of discourse (even if he just writes, 'Please stop', etc.).<p>The idea of preventing 'mob feel' reminds me of America's system of checks and balances. A democracy/republic with three branches of government is not a perfect system, but it's been sustainable.<p>I don't know the right way to do voting, but I'd recommend pg and whoever else is involved in this discussion -- think about it in terms of time (i.e., too many processes running in similar time intervals can get out of hand -- exe, leg and s.ct. are all staggered in terms of their time horizons) and symmetry (i.e., balanced levels of power).<p>Arguably, in a majority rule situation, the government's checks are in place primarily to protect minority rights (from mob rule). This seems a little different from the 'mob rule' problem being discussed (where people gravitate into two-sided arguments). But anyway, perhaps I'd try to figure out fractional voting. People with more karma (maybe 50% weighted by total karma and 50% weighted by karma velocity over the past couple of weeks) can upvote with maybe something like 1.5 the votes of everyone else.<p>But if you ask me, everyone's downvote should be significantly less than 1. Though, there could be again a 50% total and 50% velocity function for how each user's posts and comments are treated. I.e, if a user starts posting really bad stuff, then they should be able to be voted down much more quickly. But arguably, this part of the system should be tinkered with much less. Everyone, theoretically, should have a right to say whatever want. Hmm, maybe they could be forwarded to the rules for discussion and be delayed from posting (like a Hockey penalty box?)<p>I don't know. It's a complex issue. Maybe it's good enough the way it is. As this system moves forward though, it'd probably be smart to build in ways to vote/approve changes to the system. Not for everything, but  big things (analog is the presidential election. People would probably feel a lot better about it all. It's strange. Maybe you need a Constitution too.<p>Update. One last little idea. You could introduce new voting functionality perhaps as A-B tests. Some posts randomly get flagged for voting with feature X, some don't. If you could establish some metric to judge 'satisfaction' with the experience (more good karma in the discussion?), you could, basically, build 'learning' into your system.