Re: Proposal: eliminate down-votes

[doom]

You have my sympathies, but I think you're going after the wrong problem. I've been on the receiving end of that treatment myself -- I was daring to argue with someone who was clearly initially down-voting everything I said, in addition to responding to me -- but the thing that was most interesting about that was the pattern of up-votes happening with the person I was arguing with. Everything, even trivia, seemed to be getting a few up-votes: I strongly suspect he's using sock-puppets to vote for his own postings.

The fact that we don't have any sort of real, verified I.D.s means that the entire XP system is essentially a toy, which really can't be taken seriously. You can hack on it all you want-- eliminate downvotes, forbid voting in threads you're participating in, add "meta-moderation", whatever-- but it'll remain an easily gameable toy.

[aaron_baugher]

I have doubts as to how much damage one person can do to another with down-voting, even with sock puppets. Looking at my own posting history, I have made 248 posts which have received a total score of +1634, for an average of +6.6 per post. I assume I'm pretty ordinary; the most I've gotten for a post was +26 (for what I thought was a fairly routine bit about web servers and CGI -- not even directly about Perl, oddly enough) and my least was -1. (Which appeared to get two -- votes because I implied that negative look-behind is a "recent" regex feature. Oops.) No really high ones or really low ones.

So anyway, to give me 15% negative votes, as chromatic reported above, my arch-enemy would have to vote at least once on every single one of my posts. That would be too obvious if he did it from a single account, so maybe he'd divide it up with a couple sock puppets. Then, so it still wouldn't be obvious, he'd have to down-vote some other people too (and really, is the kind of person who would do this likely to only have one target?). Then to keep from getting penalized for too many down-votes, he'd have to spread around a lot of up-votes to other people -- and not just to his sock puppets, or that would be obvious too.

So I'm guessing that to make it work and keep the accounts functioning and avoid getting caught, he'd have to spread around a dozen or more votes for every negative one he gives me. And I'm not that prolific; I only post once or twice per day. To keep up with someone who posts several times a day, he'd have to spread around several dozen votes. That means more time, and even more sock puppets, just to have enough votes to keep up.

I don't know; maybe I'm not dastardly enough, but it just seems like way too much work to me.

[roboticus]

aaron_baugher:

but it just seems like way too much work to me.

Well ... uh ... perhaps he could write a script? I hear perl is nice...

/me ducks and runs...

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

[Argel]

You might find this thread interesting: Looking for "random upvote" script.