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Re: Attack of the Downvote Bots

by Anonymous Monk
on Jul 30, 2001 at 22:50 UTC ( [id://100919]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Attack of the Downvote Bots

I admit to being part of the downvote bots (hence the AM). However, it wasn't really intentional. I was interested in the phenomenon, same as you. The only way for me to uncover the current reps, was to vote on the posts. Since there is no '0' vote, I unfortunately tended to '--' sierrathedog04 and '++' everyone else. (I was a bit pissed because I *knew* abigail might just pack up his bags and leave).

It's hardly fair to sierrathedog04, I know, but thats the way my votes got cast. If there had been a '0' vote, I would have used it on all but about one of the posts.

I wonder how many of the '--' posts were cast in a similiar fashion?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Attack of the Downvote Bots
by tadman (Prior) on Jul 31, 2001 at 03:23 UTC
    I can only suppose that more than one person had this strategy, because there is a very specific trend occuring here. "Blind downvoting" or "personality voting" as merlyn would put it, is, in my opinion, inconsiderate. The entire idea behind the votes is with respect to the post, not the poster.

    While the entire thread was off-topic to begin with, a relatively harmless post Re: Re: Re: Omigawd! Surprised by Reality! for example, is sent down to -18, and a straightforward follow-up Re: Just a thought... is hammered down to -15. These are posts that are many levels deep, a depth at which you might expect to see no more than 10 votes cast in as many months. It would seem that people deliberately sought out these posts and downvoted them. Not especially nice, is it?

    Even a, to put it politely, tactfully lacking individual such as pokemonk, who certainly keeps NodeReaper busy some days, is hard pressed to achieve these depths.

    One conclusion that I can draw from this is that many people use their votes as "I agree/I disagree", or even "I like them/I hate them" instead of "good post/bad post", which is how I try to use them.

    I really hope people try and be more objective in the future. Chewing up and spitting out members is not going to help anyone.
      I think you somewhat missed my point... I wasn't voting based on "like/hate." I wanted to see the reputation of the entire thread, just like everyone else here. If I could have cast '0' votes I would have.

      Since the only way to uncover a nodes score is to make a value-judgment, I did '--' sierrathedog04 more times than I really wanted to. It wasn't because I "like/hate" him, but because I couldn't bring myself to '++' much of anything in that thread.

      In this case, some (if not most) of the votes cast on deeply-nested-nodes weren't really "value judgements" at all. They were simply the result of people wanting to uncover the nodes rep. En masse this caused some unexpected and undesired results.

        I was also interested in reputation of sierrathedog04's nodes. But I voted ++ on them from following reasons:
        (1) I had gut feeling that sierrathedog04 is being slaughtered for wrong reason. I still believe it started as honest misunderstanding, and while if it was stupid from him to begin the post and then not to shut up - especially adding one rather embarrasing and tasteless follow-up- he tried hones discussion. But in the middle of flames nobody noticed it...
        (2) If total newbie will post code snippet with blatant errors, will we try to destroy him personally? Not at all. If a member of our community makes stupid mistake, after all good posts which bring him to bishop level, does not he deserves the same patience, or even more than that?
        (3) If you do not agree with your friend, will you start criticize him in front of so many others? Probably not.

        I tried to send sierrathedog04 /msg with some support and encouragement, although now I realise not too usefull - I was not aware of how bad the situation was, and matters went out of hand too quickly.

        Now when sierrathedog04 and also abigail are both gone, are we as community better of? I doubt so. Did we learn something? I am not so sure, but there are hopes. Some members are so ashamed of how they behaved during this crisis that they feel they need to post anonymously about what they did. I think it is good - I believe our community failed in this incident. Monastery survived, it is good, and we can learn from that. I am not sure what we should learn I am not expert in inner works of monastery - but I do hope that editors will next time react quicker and pull this slaughter offline sooner - to cool heads.
        For myself, although I have nothing to be proud of in this infamous thread, at least there is nothing I am ashamed of. I was not quick enough with support and some kind of solution (and also I was doing something billable at the time), but I believe I did not hurt anybody too hard.

        I do hope that both sierrathedog04 and abigail returned to our community with different nicks. If so, welcome back monks. I feel sorry if I said something what I should not, or when I was silent and afraid to loose couple of stupid XP, when I was loosing friends and should say something and make a difference, please forgive me. Please continue to contribute to knowledge in our monastery. You know you are very good, and we need your knowledge. Both of you are more knowledgeabla than I am, so it feels strange you have to start again from level 1, where I was couple months ago - but it does not matter. Knowledge is all that matters after all. Forget the XP, forget even taste of this experience, and start new reincarnation. Hope you are reading it, welcome back, and good luck.

        pmas
        To make errors is human. But to make million errors per second, you need a computer.

        FWIW, you could have gotten the same effect by watching the Worst Nodes node. The poor schlub didn't really deserve the absolute pounding he got - and I think the loss of both abigal and sierrathedog04 was mostly a result of the sharklike feeding frenzy.

        Sometimes a community can turn into a mob - and quite frankly, that's what we turned into.

        EEjack

Re: Re: Attack of the Downvote Bots
by azatoth (Curate) on Jul 31, 2001 at 10:21 UTC

    There is a null vote option, Anonymous Coward. You can change it on your User Settings page in the miscellaneous section.
    Update (Re: Below). Ok, so I was wrong on that count. Apologies. But you shouldn't have --'d.

    I can't believe you downvoted someone to see what rep it had. Two quick ways would be to check Best Nodes & Worst Nodes, to see if either are on there. But the best way, I think, would have been to ++ it.

    Then we can all sleep better at night knowing we can look our fellow man in the face the next day and say, "Hey. I gave you the benefit of the doubt on this one. I hope someday you will do the same for me."

    Azatoth a.k.a Captain Whiplash

    Make Your Die Messages Full of Wisdom!
    Get YOUR PerlMonks Stagename here!
    Want to speak like a Londoner?
      I *did* look into the 'Null Vote' option specifically on this occasion. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually let you cast a '0' vote. All it does is get around the annoying radio-box issue of not being able to "uncheck" a radio box.

      Instead of having a two element radio box ('-1','+1') there are three ('-1', 'Null', '+1'). The 'Null' option simply means "dont cast a vote on this node," and it comes preselected on all the nodes. So your options are still the same, you just have the ability to uncheck a vote before you send in your votes for the entire page.

      I can't believe you downvoted someone to see what rep it had.

      I also did this. I came into the fray quite early, and downvoted the original post hoping to alert the NodeReaper. After it became clear that the post was going to stay, I became interested in the rest of the scores. Normally it takes a lot for me to '--' a post, and I have done so rarely.

      Imagine an internal scale in my head from -10 to +10. A post would normally have to fall below -8 or above +8 for me to cast a vote. However, in this case most of sierrathedog04's posts fell around -2 in my book. Since I wanted to see the rep, and I was slightly leaning in the negative direction, I cast several '--' votes, that I wouldn't have otherwise.

      In otherwords, something has to be compelling about a post for me to vote on it. Usually that means it is extraordinarilly good or extraordinarilly bad. In this case it was midly bad, with a compelling urge to see what its rep was.

      In retrospect, the loss of both parties wasn't worth it.

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