One of the problems with "karma" sites like these is that everyone sees the same metric. But the comments you love aren't likely to be the same ones I love.

I'd like to see a system closer to a movie/music suggestion system. Personalize the crap out of everything, show me the stuff I'll probably love, and don't even bother showing me trash I'll obviously hate. And for God's sake, make it trivially easy to permanently killfile other users.

Yes, this is computationally more involved. But the result would be something that would make everyone happier (except perhaps inveterate trolls).

I actually like knowing that what I see is the same as what other people see. Among other problems, it's hard for a site to cultivate a consistent culture if everyone has their own filter bubbles in it. I don't mean to rail against customizability completely, but I see what's basically "just let everyone make their own filter bubbles" brought up way too often as a one-size-fits-all solution for culture problems on websites with the downsides almost never brought up.

There's been a few times where I was a heavy user of a small filter-bubble of a site, recommended the site to others, and then later realized most people associated the site with certain kinds of content or idealogical positions (that I had avoided in my unique view of the site). That can be uncomfortable.

As a much more minor and kind of silly case: there was a forum I was a very long-time user of, and it had an old-school visual design that I somewhat associated with the community. I expected that other users would easily recognize screenshots of it or even things with a similar color scheme. I wondered if the old-school design of it influenced the community and had considered writing something about that if I wrote about site design. Then one day I visited the forum while logged out. It had a much more modern and conventional visual design. It turned out that a new theme had been made for the site many years ago and made default only for new users which now made up the bulk of the community. I felt uncomfortably solipsistic to learn that after so much time.