I don’t think you’ve established that “this structure points directly away from that goal”.
Your thesis (if I’m understanding it right) is that weighted voting increases the role of “social proof”, which will be bad to whatever extent (1) valuable outside perspectives are getting drowned by less-valuable[1] insider-approved posts and/or (2) the highest-karma users have systematically worse judgement than lower-karma users do. This trades off against (2′) whatever tendency there may be for the highest-karma users to have better judgement. (Almost-equivalently: for people with better judgement to get higher karma.)
If 2′ is a real thing (which it seems to me one should certainly expect), simply saying “social proof is a bad thing” isn’t enough to indicate that weighted voting is bad. The badness of giving more weight to something akin to status could be outweighed by the goodness of improving the SNR in estimates of post quality.
You haven’t provided any evidence that either 1 or 2 is actually happening. You’ve said that you think the content here is of low quality, but that’s not (directly) the relevant question; it could be that the content here is of low quality but weighted voting is actually helping the situation by keeping outright junk less prominent.
My guess is that if you’re right about the quality being low, the primary reason isn’t poor selection, or poor incentives, but simply that the people here aren’t, in aggregate, sufficiently good at having and refining good ideas; and that the main effect of removing weighted voting would be to make the overall quality a bit worse. I could of course be wrong, but so far as I can tell my guess is a plausible one; do you have evidence that it’s wrong?
[1] Less valuable in context. Outside stuff of slightly lower quality that provides greater diversity of opinions could be more valuable on net, for instance.
I don’t think you’ve established that “this structure points directly away from that goal”.
Your thesis (if I’m understanding it right) is that weighted voting increases the role of “social proof”, which will be bad to whatever extent (1) valuable outside perspectives are getting drowned by less-valuable[1] insider-approved posts and/or (2) the highest-karma users have systematically worse judgement than lower-karma users do. This trades off against (2′) whatever tendency there may be for the highest-karma users to have better judgement. (Almost-equivalently: for people with better judgement to get higher karma.)
If 2′ is a real thing (which it seems to me one should certainly expect), simply saying “social proof is a bad thing” isn’t enough to indicate that weighted voting is bad. The badness of giving more weight to something akin to status could be outweighed by the goodness of improving the SNR in estimates of post quality.
You haven’t provided any evidence that either 1 or 2 is actually happening. You’ve said that you think the content here is of low quality, but that’s not (directly) the relevant question; it could be that the content here is of low quality but weighted voting is actually helping the situation by keeping outright junk less prominent.
My guess is that if you’re right about the quality being low, the primary reason isn’t poor selection, or poor incentives, but simply that the people here aren’t, in aggregate, sufficiently good at having and refining good ideas; and that the main effect of removing weighted voting would be to make the overall quality a bit worse. I could of course be wrong, but so far as I can tell my guess is a plausible one; do you have evidence that it’s wrong?
[1] Less valuable in context. Outside stuff of slightly lower quality that provides greater diversity of opinions could be more valuable on net, for instance.