I don’t think this is the same. We’re not increasing influence based on the reputation/amount of upvotes of the user, but rather based on the similarity with known-good actors. The user might never post themselves, and therefore have no karma of their own.
Perhaps I didn't describe it well enough, but I believe you're misunderstanding my intent. The user's "PageRank" is based on how they vote in relation to other users.
You seed the influence system with known good actors. Users who vote similarly to these good actors get an increased influence weight and so on. You can apply the PageRank algorithm to any graph, and this case the graph is the relation between up votes of other users.
This can work better than Elo rating because you can have disjoint seed actors serving sparsely connected (or completely disjoint) regions of your influence graph.
