I suspect that if voting reduced your own karma, some people wouldn’t vote. As it becomes obvious that this is happening, more people stop voting, until karma just stops flowing at all. (The people who persistently vote anyway all run out of karma.)
In the broader economy, it’s not the case that “If buying things reduced your income, people stop buying things, and eventually money stops flowing altogether”.
So the only way that makes sense to me is if you model content as a public good which no user is incentivised to contribute to maintaining.
Speculatively, this might be avoided if votes were public: because then voting would be a costly signal of one’s epistemic values or other things.
I suspect that if voting reduced your own karma, some people wouldn’t vote. As it becomes obvious that this is happening, more people stop voting, until karma just stops flowing at all. (The people who persistently vote anyway all run out of karma.)
In the broader economy, it’s not the case that “If buying things reduced your income, people stop buying things, and eventually money stops flowing altogether”.
So the only way that makes sense to me is if you model content as a public good which no user is incentivised to contribute to maintaining.
Speculatively, this might be avoided if votes were public: because then voting would be a costly signal of one’s epistemic values or other things.