Make only each account’s 5 most recent upvotes effect post rank. In effect this would make vote sellers need to make many more accounts to be useful, they would need to churn upvotes.
Things would move and change more frequently. Vote farming would be more obvious and make countermeasures easier.
At least that is how I imagine it would go.
I would go further and make them public as on Kbin.
They already are there, anyway (instance admins can see th), we could as well have them visible
This would make views like Top All Time useless - they’d pretty much just show new stuff.
If there is a predictable algorithm, it can and will be gamed by a bot.
The closest I’ve seen for control of voting is Slashdot: each person gets a limited number of mod points (votes) on a semi random basis. Then there is a meta moderation queue where a second group of semi randomly selected people vote on whether a given set of votes were sensible. If too many meta mods disagree with you, you don’t get as many mod points.
The biggest problem with that system is that it amplifies groupthink.
Do the votes actually matter? They mattered on Reddit because of karma, although I never did understand the point of karma. What is the point on Lemmy? I rarely even notice the up/down votes on a comment/post.
It influences whether content appears on Hot/Top/Active