This should be a philosophical question for Paul.
Can the Karma be negative for a user?
The trade-off then would be between absolute web democracy Vs keeping the users 'happy' (capitalistic?)
It's still absolute democracy there are just rules that have to be obeyed :-). Anyway the system is heavily (and rightly) skewed to encourage and award participation, hence no down-votes on submissions.
Karma = [SUM(KP1,KP2,..KPn) - n] + ROUND0[0.5x((KC1,KC2...KCm) - m)]
I changed ROUND to ROUND0 where ROUND0 always returns 0 or more. Is there a math way of representing that, that I cant remember?