I think the problems you describe are with people (so therefore should be dealt with through community standards etc.), not the karma system. How would you improve it?
The karma system is a crowd-sourced pseudo-automated, and greatly imperfect system to enforce community standards. It's not even using the "wisdom of the crowds" as it's mixing different things into a single meaningless number. It has some completely random ranges that give you different privileges (read "lift restrictions").
I haven't really thought about this, but here are some changes that I would borrow from here and there with some that I haven't seen elsewhere:
- a downvote costs you something (a karma point or half a point) ala StackExchange, which makes you think twice before you're urged to punish;
- categorize votes ala BuzzFeed reactions insteading mindlessly up-/downvoting;
- your karma gets a share of the collective karma of your reply tree - those who start vivid discussions should be rewarded;
- reward with own karma - if you really like somebody's comment, why not donate some of your own karma and reward quality comments with more than 1 point;
- there's no point to keep punishing somebody for their multiple replies - this silences voices; you should be able to pick and rate the overall participation of somebody in the thread, not punish them multiple times for each attempt for them to convey the same thing.
I don't even see a downvote button. When I came here first I thought nice you can only upvote here, so the community must be nice. Got down voted pretty quickly. What does even green username mean?
From some discussion earlier today, you must have a collective score of 500 upvotes before you have the ability to downvote. I would guess that is to enforce a period where new accounts can get used to the generally accepted standards for discussion here.
