If you were designing Reddit today what would you do to prevent this kind of stuff?
2. Give out X invites to everyone.
3. Every user now has a reference pointing to who invited them.
4. Require that you must vouch for the behavior of the people you invite, and their behavior may impact your participation.
5. Use tree traversal and analysis for pruning bad sections of the population of users. (i.e. If you see a series of bad users, go up the tree to find the source and prune it there.)
6. Work on algorithms and moderator tools to improve said analysis.
7. Give merit and incentive to those who contribute. (See: Slashdot and Everything2 systems.)
8. Add anonymous meta-moderation. (Again, see Slashdot.)
9. Give ranks and small power to users based on their merit and participation, and somewhat based on their invited friends.
I can keep going. It's a bit harsh, but I feel it'd work.
I've considered making an example app, but the hard part would be getting a critical mass of users and content. Reddit, for example, faked posting content for their first few years to seed their community. It's hard to grow a new community, if even possible.
P.S. If anyone has a lobste.rs's invite, lemme know. Curious to see how their invite-only website has progressed.
As you mentioned, it is too difficult to get off the ground with an invite system, but it may be interesting if an existing community became invite-only. Unfortunately the high risk of torpedoing your business is a deterrent.
HN user jfc said it better here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7650975
Moreover, jfc has valid points about negativity and unhelpful responses, but it remains anecdotal. As a counter, my own anecdotal experience has largely been positive on SO, and I rarely run into those problems. I am definitely not part of the cohort that was there first, and think it's a rather fair system. For example, preventing downvotes until a certain level of reputation is reached is a small check on those looking to farm karma by blanketing out competing answers. Obviously it isn't foolproof, but it at least ensures that you have actually contributed to the community at least a few times.
Perhaps his comment speaks more to the quality of the userbase than to the efficiency of the voting system?
After the initial adopters had been outnumbered, but long before reddit was popular enough to attract legions of professional marketers, popular subreddits were dominated by puns, memes, highly biased politics, emoting, etc. It's what people upvote, and it doesn't require a reputation system.
People who are picturing crowds coming in and messing up such a system aren't really getting the idea -- it is a closed system. Above the lowest layer, it is read-only to the public, unless you are given permission to contribute. The other commenter who said people don't want a system like this may be correct... but that might be a good thing. Catering to the crowds isn't the goal here. Finding the much smaller groups that are willing to put in more work to manage themselves, and engage in meaningful dialogue is exactly what might make places like /r/politics meaningful.
Give an allowance of votes per day/week. More can be bought for very cheap, like 2 cents?
Votes are a commodity that can be accumulated and used to vote others. The more popular your posts are the more votes you have pooled to use on others. Votes are slowly dissipated over time to prevent hoarding.
You'd have to find a way to deal with shills/bots. No easy solution here, invite only will stifle growth. Collecting too much personal info will stifle growth. Maybe extreme blacklisting techniques for anyone found to be manipulating?
If you could pull it off then advertisers would actually have to pay to manipulate your site, not perfect but better than reddit's free accounts to manipulate thing they have going on now.
Every time a "what would kill off Reddit" thread comes up limiting up/downvotes and paying for more comes up. I feel it would kill off Reddit. (But I'm not a Reddit fan so I wouldn't stand in their way if they wish to add it).
I think the general population is becoming more aware of how intrusive ad networks are, possibly moving the needle on making a pay service more viable. But I don't think I know any non-tech people that would be willing to pay for a Twitter/Facebook/Reddit type service today.
So, I have no good solution. But I sure hope someone figures out a good solution. The whole concept of "pick your own truth" has some terrifying consequences.