I think it's more effective to train classifiers on users' voting logs and comments in order to maintain the quality and thoughtfulness of HN.
This allows you to classify all your users into classes that resemble their characters.
e.g. A genuine nice guy won't post mean comments and won't pick 'punish' a user he disagrees with.
A person who downvotes when he disagrees can be classified as such.
I'm sure a troll has a specific pattern too.
Then you can enable or disable aspects of the site for each user-category.
e.g. disable comments from trolls, disable downvoting for people who downvote when disagree as this stimulates groupthink, etc...
A set of users can serve as a training set for each category.
It is possible to let the 'genuine'-category classify comments from users from the other categories in order to enhance the classifiers.
Actually this is an interesting machine learning problem, I still need to pick a project for my course in machine learning so I can research this if I can get my hands on the datasets.
Then you can enable or disable aspects of the site for each user-category. e.g. disable comments from trolls, disable downvoting for people who downvote when disagree as this stimulates groupthink, etc...
A set of users can serve as a training set for each category. It is possible to let the 'genuine'-category classify comments from users from the other categories in order to enhance the classifiers.
Actually this is an interesting machine learning problem, I still need to pick a project for my course in machine learning so I can research this if I can get my hands on the datasets.