Re: Re (2): I dont need your politics any more. (discussion)

[marius]

As I don't post that much, nor do I downvote much, I'll add one idea to perhaps stem this problem. You may or may not like it, as it would be adding an element of big-brother to the monastery -- something which we don't need now, but probably will need as it grows, unfortunately.

How about having an Everything procedure that suspends the ability to vote for users that attain a ratio of lopsiding downvoting? I don't know whether or not Everything stores information in a DB about how you vote, but if it does it could suspend voting privs for a time period (say a week) if people do votebot downvoting.

I'd initially thought of this with a ratio per level, that decreases, but I don't think this is a good idea, because as the votebots accumulate levels, their ratios will decrease. Honestly, in the monastery at this time, how many of you spend more than 10% on downvotes? I think most people where it matters have the ability to consider a node rather than downvote it, if it is purely a troll node. And we already have procedures in place to stem consideration abuse.

The one thing I don't like about this approach is we'll have the opposite problem. Bad nodes will get upvoted a bit. I know I'm guilty of this myself periodically when I don't have much time in a day to visit, so I come here an use all my votes quickly.

-marius

update: and naturally, within a few seconds of posting, it goes -1. Irony, or disagreement? Ah well, at least I can hope for irony and laugh about it. =]

[kudra]

I think most people where it matters have the ability to consider a node rather than downvote it

This is not entirely the case; a node must have a negative reputation to be reaped.

Downvotes have a place in the current consideration system and as such I feel that limiting them would break the technical aspect of troll-control without removing the social problem of vote-attacks, which, after all, can be carried out even more effectively with multiple logins anyway.

[fpina]

I'm not voting you up or down, I'm replying you, so I guess I'm in the safe way :-)

Anyway, I just want to make the point that nobody should be punished by just downvoting. Sometimes you're interested in an article (or you think it is a good contribution, or that the tone is ok), others you're not. Therefore, sometimes you upvote, others you downvote. I wouldn't dare to say which level of downvoting is ok for each person, as this may vary depending on the user experience, knowledge or personality. Thus, I would be against establishing any kind of limitiation to how many downvotes a user may cast.

On the other side, I may agree with you about avoiding the use of votebots, but I feel they should be addressed separately: they're bad, weather they are used for downvoting or upvoting.