I think we all agree that the current state of the voting algorithm is far from optimal. I've come up with the following technical suggestions that will fix some of the largest problems of the current iteration:

1. People can vote way too much

One of the main problems currently is those trending posts that could be considered lower quality. The main reason for that is that people don't get punished when they ride along on a lower quality post that for whatever reason started trending, because they can still vote dozens of times more without significant repercussions.

Solution:

• Voting power reduction has to be much more significant. I suggest when starting at 100%, after 10 votes you should be around 50% voting power. This still leaves the ability for people to vote over a 100 times each day if they want, but probably don't spend their votes that have the most impact on low quality content.
• Voting power should take 24 hours at most to be restored to 100%.

Now there is a new problem: when you are at 100% you might want to up-vote something and although it's not the best content you've ever seen, you still want to reward the content creator. This can be solved by adding a new feature: give the user the ability to choose what percentage of their remaining voting power they want to "invest" in this post!

2. Down-voting

Down-voting isn't very popular right now. The main reason is that not only don't you get rewarded for spotting bad content, you in fact get punished for it (any vote or vote change costs you voting power).

Solution:

• People should get curating rewards based on the amount of down-votes a certain post has when they downvoted it. This way it's a true battle of up-votes and down-votes because both parties are trying to make money by voting on the post based on the quality. This works very well in conjunction with the above proposed limitations to voting.
• Receiving a significant amount of down-votes should reduce your ability to post. Continued abuse should result in temporary bans from posting that get exponentially more severe.

3. Voting on low quality content

Just as you should get rewarded for up-voting high quality content, you should get punished for up-voting low quality content. Currently you can vote on low quality content all you want.

Solution:

• Consistently voting on low quality posts (posts that receive a lot of down-votes) should significantly reduce voting power. This also works very well in conjunction with the first suggestion of revamping the voting power reduction algorithm.

Conclusion

The above suggestions solve some major problems (including giving bots no financial advantage). The changes are relatively simple to implement, but extremely effective. Leave a comment below with your opinion on the subject. Cheers.