Make the karma system give you tools for interacting with the community

[L0Lock]

I've been thinking for a long time about putting the Karma system in practical use and make it a tool to earn privileges, similar to some other platforms like Reddit, Steam, and especially Stack Overflow (see their classic privileges tree).
The point isn't to make a race for the shiny medals (even though we can't avoid it), but the main idea is to create an environment where doing more for the community rewards you with tools to do even more. Kind of gamifying the community, you start at level one, you have to learn how to do things, you unlock abilities and traits as you go that allow you to do more things or the same things but faster.

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The effects are many:

• Positive and forthcoming behavior, and interacting more with the community, all that goes from a personal moral choice to highly sought after and actively rewarded attitudes.
• Forces you to learn how to use the site and how to be a good citizen. Because when you start from being able to do only two out of a hundred things, you focus and learn these two things right. It means for example people could be able to learn to make meaningful comments to proposals before being granted the upvote and downvotes. (And as explained in the above point: they are actively rewarded for doing so)
• Free spam protection : you can't create a new account to spam votes, proposals or comments
• we could have more flagging tools (specific things like duplicates, wrong title or tags, needs more detail, formatting, development status, ...) because some users with certain perks can take care of it.
• It shares some of the moderation load on trusty users, as you can give some power to high-karma users. Basically you get a self-feeding and scalable moderation teem.
• better quality proposals. Because of all of the above, people are more encouraged to and better trained to do so. But you can also grant high karma users the right to edit posts (first as a request that has to be validated by someone, then automatically). That means: old proposals made long ago by absent users can be refreshed and enhanced. People who struggle with English or using Markdown can be helped directly, and their posts instantly made able to reach what they wanted.

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In practice, we could think of multiple things (from low to high karma):

• level 0 : new user limitation (can only post a limited amount of proposal/comment per 24h, no more than X links, only basic legal flagging tools like inappropriate/illegal content, no vote, and can only see votes percentages {no vote count nor voters lists})
• level 1 : removal (or enhancement) of new user limitations quotas. Still no votes and vote data visibility.
• level 2 : vote up
• level 3 : vote down
• level 4 : view amounts on votes on other posts
• level 5 : view who voted on other posts
• level 6 : view your own post votes and related stats
• level 7 : more flagging options (duplicate, bad title, tags, dev status, ...)
• level 8 : make tags change requests (has to be validated to be effective)
• level 9 : make post edit requests (has to be validated to be effective)
• level 10 : vote to close/reopen posts
• level 11 : validate edits/tags requests and edit posts on your own with no need for approval
• level 12 : close/reopen posts with no need for approval
• level 13 : view deleted posts and vote to delete/undelete posts