How SiftKarma works
Every user at Sift’d has a value between 1 and 100 percent that is their SiftKarma. Every time they vote or comment they ’spend’ some of their SiftKarma, and every time another someone votes on their submissions and comments they ‘earn’ more.
We think this is going to be a great way to combat spammers because people who submit junk that gets buried will end up with less and less weight each time.
It also effectively deals with anyone who makes multiple accounts. If a person makes 40 accounts and tries to get their submission front paged it might work - once or twice - but eventually their 40 accounts will have a combined weight of one user with average SiftKarma. Their 40 accounts, even if they’re used to +vote each other, result in a net loss for each account.
The only way a person could maintain their deception would be by having each of their accounts participating on the site and receiving positive votes by real users which might be feasible for a couple of accounts but maintaining multiple personas that attract positive attention is likely to be impossible for any lengthy period of time.
People using services like usersubmitter.com are also going to find themselves out of luck unless they can devote time into maintaining good SiftKarma to offset what they use selling their votes.
Normal users shouldn’t suffer much, if any, penalty because of SiftKarma. Anyone using the site submitting stories, voting and commenting is going to attract positive and negative votes from other users that should keep them well balanced - unless they’re habitual trolls anyway.
