Because of its money-based voting system, Yours.org already has the potential to be vastly superior to forums like reddit where vote manipulation and sock-puppeting are rampant. Communities built on this type of system are still vulnerable, however, to individuals who have enough funds to drown out the rest of the community's votes. (The smaller the community, the more vulnerable it is, and even the biggest potential communities could probably be out-funded by large institutions like governments or large corporations.)

Another layer of curation is required on top of the post-specific voting system in order to protect communities from manipulation by well funded meddlers. What's needed is a system that provides curation of curators. Such a system could be implemented on top of the current Yours.org platform with little to no change to the current interface and experience, where all actions on the site simply affect both the curation of content, and the curation of curators .

When a user votes on an article, that vote provides valuable data in addition to that user's opinion of the post itself. That vote potentially links the voter with the other users with whom he or she agrees about that post, at least as far as whether it belongs at the top of their feeds. Similarly to how one might find a movie critic with whom one agrees, and then weigh their reviews over other critics' reviews, that coinciding voting data can be used to build up a personalized vote weight system, one which is different for every user, where users' votes are weighed differently depending on coinciding voting history.

Given that premise, a preliminary question that might come to mind is "how much more should coinciding users' votes be weighed?" Should voters with one coinciding vote get double the priority? 1.00001 times? A hundred times? The best option will probably involve a gradually increasing weight, where the extra weight given to coinciding voters starts somewhere close to zero (though the best starting values are beyond both the scope of this article and my knowledge), and then the extra weight given to users with whom one's votes have coincided would increase as the user votes more (since, in doing so, the user would be providing more data on their preferences, allowing the system to more likely do an accurate job predicting their preferences based on voters with similar preferences). The weight could asymptotically approach a given max, or approach infinity.

The arbitrary nature of the specific default values for the system is, in my opinion, an opportunity to give the user control over their experience. A user might, at times, want the "top" of their feed to be limited to posts that the weighting system considers extremely likely to be relevant to them, only showing posts voted on by voters with whom the user's votes have coincided in the past. (That is to say, the user wants the system to weigh coinciding voters' votes infinitely higher than other votes.) At other times, however, they may want to open up the top of their feed more to generally highly voted content, perhaps to be exposed to potentially quality posts that just happen to be voted on by users with whom they've not yet had a chance to build a coinciding vote reputation. (That is to say, they may want to weigh all votes equally.) A "weight slider" could allow a user to adjust the degree to which the system weighs coinciding voters' votes. The recommended weighting, given the amount of voting already done, could be indicated by a tick on the slider, giving the user a reference point for where they started, and where they might want to return for general purpose browsing.

A middle ground between doing everything "under the hood" and giving the user a "weight slider" might be to allow the turning on and off of the personal reputation system, without giving users control over the weight that the reputation system gives to other coinciding voters while it's on.

Such a personalized vote weighting scheme would help to thwart users who might try to vote specific posts to the top for personal gain. Trying to do so without building up coinciding votes with many users by consistently voting on content would have limited value, given that the highly voted-on post would actually not make it very high in many users' feeds, or would require disproportionately more votes (aka money) to get there. Having to build up coinciding votes first would also increase the amount of time and money required to "force" a post to the top of other people's feeds and, given the implementation of a "downvote" button with a similar, negative effect on the weight system, such a user would, upon heavily upvoting their own personally-vested post, immediately lose the "reputation" they'd built up with other users when those other users downvote the obviously self-serving post, likely dooming it to the bottom of other users' feeds (which are affected by the downvoters' preferences) before it gets seen by many.