No this is a horrible idea, because then you could as a hypothetical company offering hardware to be delivered somewhen in the future... (*cough*) go ahead, buy a few thousand votes and downvote everyone who begins to ask legitimate questions about valid concerns.
"Seems the users don't agree with your troll questions. Stop FUDing already." *smugface*
I think the system should be used for 'informative' posts that has vaulable information. I'm not sure if we should have such a feature in any subsection that merely has commercial offers. The point is to float good information to the top, not to make it as a vehicle for spammers to upvote certain offers.
I don't want any sort of global rating feature on the forum. Reddit is nice sometimes, but the global rating system promotes groupthink and discourages controversial posts and long posts. A web-of-trust-style rating system would be good.
The forum has enough money.
I'm not sure if I suck at explaining my ideas or if any of the other posters in this thread hijacked the original proposal. So let me briefly reiterate:
Some users have insightful and valuable posts at time. Looking at their posting history, you have to wade through hundreds of posts to find their 'best posts'.
So, if there was a feature to give credit to a certain post. For instance theymos uses a lot of resources to explain a certain feature with the forum, in a
very good and informative posts, a lot of forum users would find that post interesting and valuable, thus they would give it karma,+1,credit or whatever we'd
call it.
Then, looking at theymos' 'credit posts', we could see that the announcement from xx.xx of 2012 received 30 credits, and is thus the first post on his 'credit
post list'.
Likewise, If i wanted to see which of Gavin's posts have received 'thumbs up', I could see a list of that.
So basically the purpose of the feature would be to make valuable information more readily available. I don't see the huge potential for misuse with this
system.
There could be some measures in place to ensure less gaming of the system, like requiring 500 posts before it's allowed to '+1' a post, and only allow a user
to give '+1' once an hour for instance.
It's annoying with all '+1' posts in the forum. So it could rather be a link under each post (See all who gave +1 to this post), and then those +1's accumulating
into a 'credit post list' for the user, which is accessible in his profile.
I'm not talking about a reddit style upvote/downvote system, but rather an outright +1/credit/karma system. I think someone else could give it a better name.
The +1's should only be given to really valuable posts, for example the first post here by bitrick:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/satoshi-client-operation-overview-41718Such a post, would receive a lot of +1's, and then that post would float to the top of bitrick's 'good post list'.