At first glance I thought this sounded like a terrible idea, but hear me out...
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Right now I think we have a different vibe than Reddit. The minimum requirements to vote are converting lurkers into contributors, which gives us fresh new (and imho higher quality) voices in these discussions. But what happens further down the line, when:
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People pass the threshold and no longer have any incentive to contribute, reverting back to lurkers?
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The number of users who can vote grow enough to where it's trivial for a new user to come in and reap sufficient comment points?
For the first issue, there might be some mitigation in that habits are formed, but I don't think that's reliable.
For the second issue, we're already seeing plenty of threads saying "Hi, I'm new and trying to get upvotes, please upvote me." There will always be people who will upvote these, and I don't see a good way to stop them. And if the upvote requirements stay static, it'll just be easier and easier for people to get them as the userbase grows and a greater number of people are willing to throw free upvotes their way without meaningful contribution.
One possible solution could be diminishing upvote credit. Total up your karma into a separate number that continually goes down by x# of points each week, and you have to keep it above 0 to keep voting.
Another possible solution would be to make the requirements periodic - get 10 upvotes on your comments every month, or something to that effect. If everyone has similar requirements, I think the deluge of "please upvote me so I can keep voting" would be rendered less effective.
What do you all think? Or maybe I've just been reading too much Heinlein (starts at 0:32).
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[–] Servohahn 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago (edited ago)
My worry is that power users will control the content and comments. Power users tend to fuck up the content on reddit, which is something I don't like about reddit. Seeing a bunch of shitty posts by Gallowboob or the way that Unidan just dominated every conversation he was in regardless of how correct he was screwed things up. I think maybe it might be in order to increase the threshold as voat grows, but as it is, there are so few users that the threshold essentially forces one to be relatively active in order to have voting privileges.
I've never heard of an online community where lurkers desperately participate only to be able to become lurkers again. Lurkers would probably either not care enough to participate to the point that they can lurk again (but with voting privileges), or become used to participating and then continue to participate.
Even if you are right, I can't imagine that those participate-in-order-to-lurk users would make up a large portion of the userbase. And in the mean time, submissions will get stuck with low vote counts which, like it or not, tend to indicate insignificance.
I don't like the idea of making it easier for power users to dominate the content. The way it works right now is that it encourages people to participate in some fashion but doesn't give special abilities to people who might just spam content all day until they can "afford" to down vote anyone who disagrees with them while that downvoted user might only be participating in scant spare time and can't make up the vote difference.
Another idea to hold someone accountable for their voting is to make user votes public, but that comes with its own problems.