We've been discussing about changing the voting system and make it as follows:
- Everybody can give a limited amount of phuks ("votes")
- Each user gets sqrt(LEVEL) "votes" per hour
- A user can have up to LEVEL+10 "votes"
- Nobody can downvote until X condition is met and a certain badge is given
- A downvote would cost the same as two upvotes
An example: I'm level 15, so I get 3 votes per hour and I can have up to 25 votes at any time. It takes 9 hours to get 25 votes at 3/hr, so if in those 9 hours I spend my 25 votes, I can still get more for the rest of the day (at 3/hr, up to 72 per day, being level 15).
That's a valid point, maybe @Polsaker is onto something. I suppose letting people downvote on new accounts would undermine the effect of limiting the total amount of votes users have in order to stop brigading, as account creation is so easy here.
That is also another point we need to consider. How do we keep account creation easy, but make it hard enough to stop people just making a new account every time they reach their limit and want to upvote one thing? We are currently even more susceptible to vote manipulation than Voat is, because there are so few users. Restricting the number of accounts on one IP does not really work, and I wouldn't want to force people to register with an email either. It's a tricky one.