That just lowers where the "poweruser" bar maxes out, it still doesn't encourage users to vote, nor does it really help with the reason for voting (as after I use my 10 votes, what happens when I see clearly off topic or bad content? Do I need to un-vote something good? Do I need to choose to un-vote something "less off topic"? Should I just ignore it?). I have a feeling that it would be gamed as well, comments or posts earlier in the day would be more likely to get votes.
I feel making the voting process easier by creative UX would help, and then weighting can take care of the rest. If a power user votes 100X more than the average, have their votes count 100X less, or some kind of other method to weight them back into normalcy and keep the system from becoming a "most active dictates what the platform is" kind of thing.
I think you're overestimating people's need for encouragement. Slashdot cleverly gives out moderator points occasionally, not regularly, which gives users the experience of wanting them but not having them.
Slashdot sets lower and upper bounds on comment scores and lets readers set a threshold. Promoting good posts has more impact than demoting bad ones, so you'd probably just ignore all but the worst off-topic posts.
Making someone's votes count less would strongly discourage voting more often.
>Making someone's votes count less would strongly discourage voting more often.
But the nice part is you can control how you approach this weighting.
Perhaps every days votes is normalized to 10. So if I only voted once it counts 10x, but if I voted 100 times each would count .1x.
There are tons of ways to implement it so the feeling of uselessness doesn't apply, after all, qt the end of the day we are pretty gullible bags of meat.
If the weighting formula is known, I'm going to think twice before casting my second vote of the day. And it only takes one person to reverse-engineer it.
That might not be a bad thing. I'm just saying it works against your goal of getting people to vote as many times as possible.
You owe it to yourself to at least study Slashdot's system before putting too much thought into creative UX, dark patterns, and complex weighting. It isn't the last word in comment scoring, but as someone else pointed out, you could probably fill a book with all the lessons that shaped it.
I feel making the voting process easier by creative UX would help, and then weighting can take care of the rest. If a power user votes 100X more than the average, have their votes count 100X less, or some kind of other method to weight them back into normalcy and keep the system from becoming a "most active dictates what the platform is" kind of thing.