Community Enrichment

I am opening up a forum centered around informal, heated discussion of geopolitical issues, religious issues, cultural issues, and the like.

So I was wondering what everyone thought here. I am looking to find some innovative incentive system to reward users for thoughtful posts that can take a good while to write as well as a way to knit together a community of I hope both common and esoteric viewpoints through social networking or something else.

As an incentive for giving me ideas here, I'll give whomever gives me ideas that I use a copy of whatever I develop. It will most likely be using vBulletin's API, but could be an independent code base, it depends on the modification itself.

I was thinking that a system like Digg's for posts could be great; however, if a user has an unpopular viewpoint, the amount of publicity his or her post will receive will be diminished. The website is going to essentially be a repository of ideas--and as such the social networking component must be robust.

 

Maybe combine the user rating system with another automated system. For instance, there's an SMF shop mod that allows you to set it to give people points for each thread, then optionally, you could set it so that if the post contains more than "X"-amount of words, it gives the author a set amount of points for each word over.

That's just an initial thought.

 

Maybe instead of the usual "Thanks" or "helpful post" mods, you could call them the "well-reasoned" "original thinking" and "poorly thought out" buttons?

 

Who will be giving this rep out? On a site like that you're going to probably find rep to be greatly abused due to people having different opinions.

 

That's really the issue. I am trying to find an acceptable algorithm or system that will discourage or factor in that abuse.