Comment by kokanee
3 years ago
An idea I mull over occasionally: what if you could spend your karma points to boost any given post? This would ultimately be another form of paid advertising, except that the currency used would be earned by contributing to the community. Then, allow people to sell their karma points for fiat currency. Companies would buy karma points directly from users in order to promote their self-promotional posts, but those posts would be subject to the same rules and moderation as any other post. That way you're actually paying your best users rather than charging them.
This has been tried in the cryptocurrency space, people start faking accounts to upvote their content and make money.
So basically what already happens with reddit/twitter/etc but amplified because you give them a direct financial incentive to upvote low effort crap.
That doesn't really work when they have to pay for each account they use to upvote though.
Even if they boost their own post a bit for it to get the attention of others, they're still paying $2 per upvote for that. And if their post is no good, people might even just cancel those out with downvotes.
It is essentially a perfect recipe for money laundering.
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I think it can be solved by personalizing the top page(s), so you mostly see the kind of stuff you upvote. If there are a few people up-voting crap you wont see it, but they will see all of it.
I'm building https://linklonk.com which works this way - you get content ranked based on what you upvoted. This is to make the incentives for voting aligned and help prevent abuse.
I think the problem with karma/reputation systems is that the source of karma are fungible - anyone's upvote has the same effect on the reputation. And this makes it gameable.
A personalized system can solve this by replacing global reputation with user-to-user trust. Now it matters who upvoted - a random bot or a user whose past contributions have been useful to you.
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tweakers.net (a Dutch tech site that's been around since the 1998) allows you to spend your karma points in their Karmastore on things like custom-css, RSS-feeds in tracker and custom newsletter.