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Comment by MysticFear | Hacker News Reader

Upvotes should be weighed by a metric. Just as an example: New users should have less voting power and users with more karma should have a larger voting power with their upvote.

Would decrease upvote/downvote bots, incentivizes good content (higher karma gives you slightly more voting power).

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+1 to the slow and eventual consolidation of power into a few hands -- this sounds like an awesome idea, in theory, until you put it into practice.

This is exactly what happened at Digg and was a huge reason for it's downfall -- combating this with the disaster of a total rewrite and eventually collapse of the card castle.

Watching that unfold made me realize... no matter how smart you are, people that can make money (or clicks or impressions) from your system are going to be smarter.

> users with more karma should have a larger voting power with their upvote

That will just make it more valuable to game the karma system. .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidan#Vote_Fraud

Really? Unidan has his own page? If ever there was a reason for Wikipedia's speedy deletion... Is /u/shittywatercolour notable enough too? Holy shit, he is.

Is Wikipedia trying to be knowyourmeme.com?

Wikipedia is pretty confused about what it wants to be. On one hand, "the sum of all human knowledge" includes a lot of minutiae that WP doesn't consider worthy of its servers. WP expresses that with notability guidelines. On the other hand, the extant notability guidelines means that a media blackout on you or your cause can keep you out of an encyclopedia that you really deserve to be in.

WP is an extremely political place. I was a relatively early editor and co-founder of an early Wikiproject. Ridiculously unnotable things like Unidan can slide because nobody really cares, but if you try to put something notable and controversial, but not necessarily widely known, in, you're going to have a bad time fighting off deletion requests and vandals.

It's not that nobody cares, it's that all that you need to have a page is 'notability' and notability is defined as having media articles written about you. If I can get the New York Times and one other publication to write an article on the spider that lives outside my front door, I can create a Wikipedia article for that spider and nobody can take it down, per Wikipedia policy.

Why in the world does that Wikipedia page exist?

Maybe, but if not done carefully, this could also lead to a coterie of high karma "power users" who control the content regular users see. High potential for corruption and drama. This already happens (for example that "biologist here!" fellow who controlled a voting ring to promote his own content and downvote competing content), make karma worth something might make the problem even worse.

I disagree. This would simply skew the entire site towards content that nets high karma, and high karma users. I have seen no evidence that high karma users post content any better than a new user, and often times, they are worse - manipulative or egotistical.

Exactly what Reddit needs, more reasons to karmawhore.

I mean the idea doesn't sound too bad, but the problem is that users with the most karma are usually those who post the most low-effort content. Memes, Lists, message-in-headline articles, etc.

I think that how long the account has been around should have more of an effect to a cut off like 6 months or 1 year. It's pretty easy to accumulate karma by making garbage posts with memes and spamming those.

In my experience, users with high karma tend to post content which is reddit-referential. If that's the case, then this system would probably make the site less newbie-friendly.

Voting should be weighted. Poor people with less money should have less voting power, and rich people with lots of money should have larger voting power.

High karma users are the worst though, why would you want to give them more power?

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