Looks like karma, a mechanism designed to encourage people to post valuable comments, actually demotivates submitting everything more valuable, thus controversial. In other words, down-voting in comments, that was designed to punish exceptionally bad posts, actually punishes all exceptional comments.
Karma is designed to motivate submissions deemed valuable to the community. "Exceptional" is relative to the community and reflects its collective taste.
With this many headline spots, this many eyes, and this many submissions, it is unreasonable to expect a filtering mechanism that worked for population size x would work similarly for 10x. Your voice is diluted; what you used to consider {attribute} is now something completely orthogonal.
