Actually I would like the ranking algorithm to distinguish between a comment with no votes and a comment with 5 upvotes and 5 downvotes. I think the latter usually shows the comment is controversial and probably deserves to be displayed as it's likely to be interesting. This makes it so that people can still use votes as agree/disagree without negatively impacting the quality of the debate.

I suppose it depends on whether or not you want to promote controversial discussion, which you may not. It would be harder to enforce etiquette through downvotes and might bring on eternal september sooner.

That said, if you wanted to experiment, one simple way to do this is simply to make the number of points an upvote grants different than the number of points a downvote produces. Not for purposes of karma, I think HN probably does that right now, but simply for purposes of comment ranking.

The downside is jokes that aren't that funny would likely be ranked higher than they should be under this algorithm. (The only instance I can think of where downvotes that came along with upvotes served as suitable chastisement under the current algorithm but might not under the approach I just outlined.)

Then again, I'm new here, so grain of salt.

Could you try one of our suggested solutions, and as long as it doesn't mess the whole site up, keep it? And if it doesn't solve our original issue, try another one of the suggested solutions, and as long as it doesn't screw things up keep it?

I mean iterate, so that HN can evolve right?

I agree that public sentiment should not always be factored in, as we will naturally oppose change. So if you test a radically new system you'll get opposition. But as long as the actual results aren't negative, I think it's at least progress.

And the new system can be opt-in while it's being tested.