One could reasonably interpret karma as demonstrating that many people thought a comment was valuable for public discussion.
However, I am exceedingly wary of changing the way moderation works based on a comment’s karma score [...] while some users contribute more value to Forum discussion than others, and karma can be a signal of this, I associate the pattern of “giving ‘valued’ users more leeway to bend rules/norms” with many bad consequences in many different settings.
Even if we make a point to acknowledge how useful a contribution might have been, or how much we respect the contributor, I don’t want that to affect whether we interpret it as having violated the rules. We can moderate kindly, but we should still moderate.
(Sharing my personal views as a moderator, not speaking for the whole team.)
See my response to Larks on this:
Even if we make a point to acknowledge how useful a contribution might have been, or how much we respect the contributor, I don’t want that to affect whether we interpret it as having violated the rules. We can moderate kindly, but we should still moderate.