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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

A karma system and/or paid accounts, which will discourage people from breaking the rules (because they now have something tangible to lose, either their high-karma account or the money they paid for it).

The karma system can also reduce the amount of content needed to moderate because low-karma users will be limited by the system (to limit the potential damage from a fresh malicious account) while the high-karma users are more or less trusted because they have much to lose by breaking the rules.

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People tend to downvote posts with opinions they don't like. So eventually there'll be only one opinion in a given community. I saw it happening more than once.

On a good account, downvotes for unpopular opinions would still be balanced with upvotes from the popular opinions. I often post stuff that goes against the mainstream in here and my karma is still good despite taking the occasional hit.

I agree that the system isn't perfect (it would fail if you only post unpopular - but otherwise valid and within the rules - opinions), but wouldn't it still be better than the current situation?

> A karma system

Upvoting and downvoting can and have been gamed by users and groups of users. It's a fine distraction to drive engagement in a social media space, but you cannot delegate moderation to the crowd without it turning into hot mess.

> and/or paid accounts.

At some point this might have been a good idea, but it doesn't stop bad actors from joining or returning through credit card fraud.

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Have you looked at tildes? It's a reddit/HN-style site, but with stronger moderation and no downvote button. But the most interesting feature is that you have to be invited to the site by somebody, and the chain of invites is tracked, so if there are a bunch of troublemakers that all seem to have a root at one individual, the moderators can get rid of the whole tree if need-be.

> it doesn't stop bad actors from joining or returning through credit card fraud.

It still raises the barrier to entry significantly. Stolen credit cards are not free to obtain, either you buy them off someone else for $$$ or you obtain them for free through your own means but then you're losing $$$ by wasting them on spam accounts instead of selling them for actual money.

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