Perhaps instead the karma of a post ought not to be linear in the number of upvotes it receives? If the karma of a post is best used as a signal of the goodness of the post, then it is less noisy as more data points appear, but not linearly so.
There is perhaps still a place for karma as a linear reward mechanism—that is, pleasing 10 people enough to get them to upvote is, all other things being equal, 10 times as good as pleasing 1 person—but this might be best separated from the signal aspect.
Perhaps instead the karma of a post ought not to be linear in the number of upvotes it receives? If the karma of a post is best used as a signal of the goodness of the post, then it is less noisy as more data points appear, but not linearly so.
There is perhaps still a place for karma as a linear reward mechanism—that is, pleasing 10 people enough to get them to upvote is, all other things being equal, 10 times as good as pleasing 1 person—but this might be best separated from the signal aspect.
Which of the things that karma is used for do you think would benefit from nonlinearity, and which nonlinearity?