[walden42]

> On sites like reddit and FB, it costs the content providers effectively nothing to manipulate votes.

But that's offset by the sheer volume of people who can freely vote. If you have a system where a vote is a payment, you'll likely have a >95% reduction of legitimate voters, and likely a much higher amount of "gamed" voters as a result. Remember, corporations and governments have more money to spend than the average person. I.e. All governments/corporations can afford to spend money + some individuals can spend money. Compare that with: All governments/corporations can freely upvote + all individuals can freely upvote. Requiring money actually skews voting in the wrong direction.

That's why I think Reddit made a smart decision when they implemented Reddit guilding for top-level comments. They did it in such a way that guilding doesn't affect voting, and guilded comments can't even be seen from the homepage--otherwise it would skew the results.

I do totally agree about other ways to support creators, though. I think it's crucial for sites like StackOverflow to implement direct tipping for users' efforts.

[command_line]

You might be right - that, ultimately, we find that the system can be gamed more. That's not our hunch, and it's way too early to tell at this point, but we won't ignore the results if that's how it turns out.

StackOverflow really needs to implement this functionality, though. The hours upon hours we've saved by some of the answers there really deserved a real reward.