What about disabling voting until a user reaches a certain amount of karma? Of course, you'd have to give the upvote ability to the original members (hand selec

What about disabling voting until a user reaches a certain amount of karma? Of course, you'd have to give the upvote ability to the original members (hand selected?) so that the system could actually get off the ground. It would be similar to the "invite only" community idea where older users have to actually approve new members, but less restrictive. Perhaps even have upvotes on users instead of just comments. It would be similar to an "invite", but just for allowing them to vote. I'd say also keep the hellbanning that we have here. There will sadly be some false positives, but it seems to work very well for keeping out the worst. Perhaps upvoting users could affect the reputation of the folks doing the upvoting. If you upvote a bad user into the community, your reputation suffers as well. Now, this does nothing to solve the problem of groupthink, and in fact somewhat enforces it. However, I think some amount of groupthink is inevitable if you want to create a strong sense of community. Because you're trying to cluster users around a core set of values, it's probable that they'll think similarly in other ways as well. Edit: I think multidimensional voting helps as well. Ignoring the comments voted "funny" on /. helps to filter out what people liked just because it was amusing. I think "agree/disagree" voting would be useful as a separate thing, because too often that winds up conflicting with upvoting/downvoting for quality.