Of course, this is not perfect (what if someone posts about history in a science subreddit, or vice versa), but it’s a start. AFAIK no platform has tried weighted voting yet.
So, how would a new user gain reputation, if their every comment is buried under all the karma farmers in every post?
Additionally servers could give users some bonus starting karma for free if they have, for example, a verified phone number and email tied to the account. This can be done privacy sensitive by simply having the home server give a boolean of whether or not that is the case. Just like in mastodon, this would be an honor based system, where if you lie, you might get kicked out of the network.
Combine it with something like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20861911 and I think one would be at a decent starting point.
> [...]
> If it costs something people would be more careful.
> The cost can be anything:
> - Classify 5 answers correctly
> - Pick answers from a multiple choice
> - Pay a dollar
> - Wait a few days to activate
> - etc
> Ideally the user should be able to choose a method that suits them but make the account worth something.
> [...]
Imagine a reddit clone, but where your karma is not useless but actually reputation points : the better your reputation, the higher your post/comment is ranked.
Your reputation could be subreddit-scoped, and each subreddit could decide to value the existing reputation of a user based on their reputation on another subreddit : e.g. if you have a high reputation on /askhistorians, you automatically get a good one on /history_lovers, and inversely if you get a good reputation on /woman_beater you get a terrible reputation everywhere.
A specific system for new users similar to the one on StackOverflow could allow for a deeper check of new users/alt-accounts.
And in the end, people could vote on post to provide reputation without actually needing to see the name of the author, providing a better anonymity part : you're not anonymous to the website, but you're not doxxable by random users either.