Oh, spam certainly should be deleted. The spam-lover example was just to illustrate that under a local reputation system, a voter can make terrible choices and it doesn’t affect anyone who doesn’t have the same bad taste.
There are three advantages of a local reputation system:
- Bad actors that no one trusts can vote all they want and it won’t affect the outcome.
- Some are provably sockpuppet proof.
- You don’t run into people complaining about the way other people vote as much, because you tend to only see the votes from people with similar voting standards to you.
Notably, there are global reputation systems with the first two of those properties.
I’m not aware of any local reputation systems that have a concept of a non-participating observer, but there are solutions for bootstrapping new users and that involves similar issues. Probably the most practical system would be to have a curated list of “good” voters and run the numbers for the view of someone who trusts them, and show that for the logged out view.