My silly idea is that your voting power should not scale with your karma directly, but should scale with the number of unique upvotes minus the number of unique downvotes you received. This prevents circular feedback.
Reasons
Hypothetically, if you had two factions which consistently upvote themselves, A with 67 people, and B with 33 people. People in A will have twice as many unique upvotes as people in B, and their comments can have up to 4 times more karma (in the simplistic case where voting power scales linearly with karma).
However, if voting power depends not on unique upvotes but on karma, then at first people in A will still have twice as many unique upvotes as people in B, and their comments will still have more than 4 times more karma. But then, (in the simplistic case where voting power scales linearly with karma), their comments will have 8 times more karma. Which further causes their comments to have 16 times more karma.
This doesn’t happen in practice because voting power doesn’t scale linearly with karma (thank goodness), but circular feedback is still partially a problem.
My silly idea is that your voting power should not scale with your karma directly, but should scale with the number of unique upvotes minus the number of unique downvotes you received. This prevents circular feedback.
Reasons
Hypothetically, if you had two factions which consistently upvote themselves, A with 67 people, and B with 33 people. People in A will have twice as many unique upvotes as people in B, and their comments can have up to 4 times more karma (in the simplistic case where voting power scales linearly with karma).
However, if voting power depends not on unique upvotes but on karma, then at first people in A will still have twice as many unique upvotes as people in B, and their comments will still have more than 4 times more karma. But then, (in the simplistic case where voting power scales linearly with karma), their comments will have 8 times more karma. Which further causes their comments to have 16 times more karma.
This doesn’t happen in practice because voting power doesn’t scale linearly with karma (thank goodness), but circular feedback is still partially a problem.