> I think there should be a cost to upvoting or downvoting, so they can't be handed out willy-nilly.

It would be really interesting to run an experiment where this was taken literally. If upvotes/karma/whatever you call it were to be treated as almost a type of currency, and submitting a vote directly cost you a vote from your “balance” what would the discussions look like. You could even deal with inflation by lowering the value of votes people already have by increasing the cost for a new vote.

I don’t think this would get you away from the groupthink and pandering comments, as people would probably try to appeal to the widest audience so they could bank more votes, but I’d love to see if it would cause people to post more meaningful comments as opposed to predictable jokes.

Dude, you're here just six months and you already decided that the system doesn't work? I'm here 8 years and I haven't had a single problem with how voting works. When I'm downvoted it's because I say something snarky, generalized, or stupid. HN is by far the most healthy moderated community on the web.

> It's easy to farm them by hopping on the winning bandwagon on divisive topics.

> I think there should be a cost to upvoting or downvoting, so they can't be handed out willy-nilly.

Would a cost to voting not encourage farming points?

Aside from the 500 points (or whatever it is now) hurdle to be able to downvote (on HN, and similar though not the same hurdle for /.'s meta moderation), internet points are surely just internet points and any mechanism that made them more would end up in farming / community-moderated voice would tend to the farmers.

Hacker News does frequently upvote popular opinions, just like Reddit, but I’ve found that substantiated “unpopular” or surprising opinions aren’t treated as harshly. Often they actually do rather well!

The easy counter is to stop graying out downvoted posts. An even easier counter is to get rid of the downvotes entirely. Have a reporting system to take care of the rule-breakers. For everyone else, bad posts will generally not be upvoted and will thus lurk in the bottom of the page. Underneath all the upvoted comments.

That’s not perfect but I think it would be an improvement over the current system. As an added bonus, it would eliminate the “why am I downvoted” noise.

Slashdot had a nice system back in the day. People were randomly selected to rank posts. You had to give a reason (from a list) for your ranking. And posts would max out at 5 points or have a floor of -1. Maybe that wouldn’t scale to Reddit but it was a fairly humane way of doing things that was a bit resistant to mobs and bots.

That kind of system loses its point too, like on Facebook etc.

For example I could mark your comment "Funny" to "laugh at you for even suggesting such a thing" :)