If the LW community cares about this issue, then they should just petition an admin to check who is doing the downvoting. There is a log of “liked” and “disliked” which is available. They could even set “dislikes” to public. Even in the event that the retributive downvoter uses a puppet account to downvote, we can still automatically prevent accounts from selectively downvoting all a users posts.
There’s absolutely no reason to guess at naming specific people and starting a witch hunt. Since the person didn’t necessarily use a sockpuppet, there may is an easy way to know for sure who is doing this if we are willing to do just a little extra waiting and petitioning the mods.
I say this as one of the people who has been block downvoted. Even discounting the chance of ialdabaoth naming the wrong name, I doubt that the act of naming someone has a better expected outcome than the act of not naming someone. It sets a bad precedent and makes the community vulnerable to all sorts of social exploits in the future. In particular, since downvote sources are hidden, framing is completely trivial to do.
(I realize the admins haven’t done anything about the issue in the past, but despite that this is still the course of action I would advocate.)
Anyway, it’s too late for ialdabaoth to not name his/her suspicions. As we have already seen, it has had an adverse outcome regardless of whether his/her guess (which even s/he put at only p>.75) was correct and has led to more abuse of the voting system. Downvoting as retribution against retributive down-voting is dumb because retributive downvoters can simply take alt. accounts and continue what they were doing.
However, we can still petition the admins to check the records / make downvoting public / put in automated measures / etc.. We can still not do this “guessing” thing next time. We can still create a informal rule against calling people out for things despite low certainty.
If the LW community cares about this issue, then they should just petition an admin to check who is doing the downvoting. There is a log of “liked” and “disliked” which is available. They could even set “dislikes” to public. Even in the event that the retributive downvoter uses a puppet account to downvote, we can still automatically prevent accounts from selectively downvoting all a users posts.
There’s absolutely no reason to guess at naming specific people and starting a witch hunt. Since the person didn’t necessarily use a sockpuppet, there may is an easy way to know for sure who is doing this if we are willing to do just a little extra waiting and petitioning the mods.
I say this as one of the people who has been block downvoted. Even discounting the chance of ialdabaoth naming the wrong name, I doubt that the act of naming someone has a better expected outcome than the act of not naming someone. It sets a bad precedent and makes the community vulnerable to all sorts of social exploits in the future. In particular, since downvote sources are hidden, framing is completely trivial to do.
(I realize the admins haven’t done anything about the issue in the past, but despite that this is still the course of action I would advocate.)
Anyway, it’s too late for ialdabaoth to not name his/her suspicions. As we have already seen, it has had an adverse outcome regardless of whether his/her guess (which even s/he put at only p>.75) was correct and has led to more abuse of the voting system. Downvoting as retribution against retributive down-voting is dumb because retributive downvoters can simply take alt. accounts and continue what they were doing.
However, we can still petition the admins to check the records / make downvoting public / put in automated measures / etc.. We can still not do this “guessing” thing next time. We can still create a informal rule against calling people out for things despite low certainty.