Reddit is a popular website where users can submit posts and comments, and then groups of users can "vote" posts and comments up or down so that in theory the most popular posts and comments will be voted to the top and get the most views. Virtually no one makes money by having their posts voted to the top of Reddit, but (I know from experience) it's a rush when something that you wrote gets voted to the front page and receives thousands of views and comments.
However, like most sites that allow post and comment voting, Reddit is plagued with problems of "brigading," where users can organize mobs of their friends or like-minded allies to join a particular discussion on the site and vote a particular comment up or down. (On a smaller scale, users can create multiple "sockpuppet" accounts all under their own control, in order to influence voting, but this is easier to detect and impractical for casting more than a handful of fake votes. Large-scale vote manipulation is usually achieved with some type of brigading.) The site's terms of service explicitly prohibit "vote manipulation," but it happens anyway.
But I think there's a relatively simple fix to all of these problems: when a new post is created, release it to a random sample of the target audience. (Reddit is divided into "subreddits" dedicated to particular topics, so in most case, your target audience would be the subscribers in a particular subreddit.) Suppose you release it to a sample of, say, 20 people. Those users rate the post or vote it up or down, based on whether they think it's on-topic and interesting.
If the average of those votes is high enough, then the system promotes the post to the other subscribers of that subreddit. Otherwise, the post is voted down, and optionally, the original author can be notified, "Your post was voted down because a random sample of 20 users in this subreddit rated it to be low-quality."
It sounds deceptively simple, but this would render most attempts at vote-manipulation obsolete. You can't garner a bunch of your friends and allies (or a group of fake accounts under your control) to go and vote a particular post up or down because the system selects the voters from a random sample of the target audience. The only way for your post or comment to score well in this system is to write something that actually, genuinely appears to the target audience (and hence would get good scores from a random sample of the target audience), which is what you're supposed to be doing anyway.
It's not likely that anyone from Reddit will actually read this post, but I've been talking up this idea whenever possible for a couple of months now. If it filters through to the right people and they give it a shot, they might be surprised how many headaches it saves people, by turning an easily game-able system into something much closer to a meritocracy.
