The Less Wrong diaspora demonstrates that the toughest competition for online forums may be individual personal blogs. By writing on your personal blog, you build up you own status & online presence. To be more competitive with personal blogs, it might make sense to give high-karma users of a hypothetical SSC forum the ability to upvote their own posts multiple times, in addition to those of others. That way if I have a solid history of making quality contributions, I'd also have the ability to upvote a new post of mine multiple times if it was an idea I really wanted to see get out there, in the same way a person with a widely read personal blog has the ability to really get an idea out there. The mechanism I outlined above (downvotes taking away karma from the people who upvoted a thing) could prevent abuse of self-upvoting: if I self-upvote my own post massively, but it turns out to be lousy, other people will downvote it, and I'll lose some of the karma that gave me the ability to self-upvote massively.