Picture this: Your outspoken (sometimes confrontational and rude) community member is on Zoom with you bringing up an Idea. You let them know the best way to submit feature requests is to post an Idea. They then speak with your product manager and they let them know that they prioritize ideas based on the amount of votes they have. “Perfect”, your outspoken community member thinks. They create an idea just like you asked them to and they share the link with their 1M followers. They repeat this process several times until they have created dozens of ideas. Their followers have voted for ALL of the ideas your outspoken community member posted and now these ideas have hundreds of votes, completely shadowing every other idea by the community. Oh boy. Now a single member single-handedly controls your product roadmap.
The problem: Once your community has adopted Ideas, there is nothing stopping them from voting on ALL ideas. On top of that, if influential members choose to publicize their ideas, your Ideation strategy becomes a popularity contest, not a reflection of what your community needs. While the community votes are limitless, your product team’s resources are NOT.
The solution: Allow moderators to set a limit for the amount of votes a user type gets. The votes are replenished in “X” amount of time.
What it looks like: Moderator A set user type “champion” to get 10 votes/month, user type “member” to get 2 votes/month, and user type “superuser” to get 8 votes/month.