All you have to do is issue a decree that encourages people to upvote civility and downvote incivility, as opposed to the current standard which says upvote agreement and downvote disagreement.

People upvoted this guy because they agreed with his fundamental points despite the baiting, and in turn he received positive feedback. I think maybe you underestimate the effect karma has on posting behavior; it's not just about pushing comments up and down the page.

>All you have to do is issue a decree that encourages people to upvote civility and downvote incivility, as opposed to the current standard which says upvote agreement and downvote disagreement.

This doesn't matter. Doesn't work on reddit, doesn't work on StackOverflow, and won't work anywhere else.

I'd be interested in reading more about that if you have a link. Reddit says to "moderate based on quality, not opinion" whereas PG said explicitly to do the opposite. (I can't remember how to find the link atm, but it was a comment in some thread on HN that I've seen people refer to.)

http://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette

I also found this discussion, which says that in practice there will always be a middle ground between moderating based on quality and moderating based on opinion:

http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1g14yo/is_th...

because our ego bias is to moderate based on opinion. However that's why a guideline to moderate based on quality pulls things towards the middle.