highvote

Highvote is a voting mechanism used in online communities that scales vote influence with trusted participation rather than counting every vote equally. It assigns a weight to each user's vote based on reputation or stake, so experienced or verified contributors have more influence on decisions. The aim is to improve decision quality while preserving broad participation.

Mechanism: a user’s reputation score, derived from demonstrated contributions, voting history, moderation activity, and identity verification, determines their vote weight. When a proposal is voted on, each vote is multiplied by the voter's weight; the tally is a weighted sum. Some implementations apply decay, caps, or domain-specific weights. To prevent abuse, identity checks, per-proposal limits, and audit-ready tallies are common.

Applications: highvote has been proposed for open-source project governance, large community wikis, decentralized organizations, and content-curation systems that decide features, policies, or content inclusion.

Advantages: aligns influence with contribution and expertise, supports faster decision convergence on high-signal proposals, and reduces noise from casual voting. Critics warn of entrenchment, centralization risk, and reduced minority representation, and argue the system can be complex or opaque.

History: the idea has appeared in governance discussions since the 2010s, with experimental deployments on several platforms seeking scalable, accountable participation.

See also: weighted voting, reputation systems, governance protocols.