I got rate-limited a few weeks ago for a small number of strong downvotes on a single comment. I blame the over-indexing on strong-votes, and still overall support the system. It DOES have some false-positives, but there is a real problem with otherwise-valuable posters getting caught in a high-volume useless back-and-forth, making the entire post hard to think about.
Rate throttling is a transparent, minimally-harmful, time-limited mechanism to limit that harm. It makes mistakes, and it’s annoying when one disagrees with votes. But I don’t know of a better option.
FYI we’ve since updated the system to only trigger based if there are enough unique downvoters on ‘net-negative comments’, which I think should reduce the false positive rate.
(Ie I think the reason it triggered in your case was that you also have some random downvotes on other upvoted comments)
Yeah, part of it was the selection for recency of vote, even on old comments—a positive-total comment from the past got some new downvotes, and that triggered the throttle.
That’s probably a flaw that shouldn’t result in rate-limiting (which reduces NEW posts, not old ones, obviously), but my main point is that the imperfect implementation is still pretty good.
I’m glad you’re continuing to refine it, but I don’t want it removed entirely or reworked from the ground up.
I got rate-limited a few weeks ago for a small number of strong downvotes on a single comment. I blame the over-indexing on strong-votes, and still overall support the system. It DOES have some false-positives, but there is a real problem with otherwise-valuable posters getting caught in a high-volume useless back-and-forth, making the entire post hard to think about.
Rate throttling is a transparent, minimally-harmful, time-limited mechanism to limit that harm. It makes mistakes, and it’s annoying when one disagrees with votes. But I don’t know of a better option.
FYI we’ve since updated the system to only trigger based if there are enough unique downvoters on ‘net-negative comments’, which I think should reduce the false positive rate.
(Ie I think the reason it triggered in your case was that you also have some random downvotes on other upvoted comments)
Yeah, part of it was the selection for recency of vote, even on old comments—a positive-total comment from the past got some new downvotes, and that triggered the throttle.
That’s probably a flaw that shouldn’t result in rate-limiting (which reduces NEW posts, not old ones, obviously), but my main point is that the imperfect implementation is still pretty good.
I’m glad you’re continuing to refine it, but I don’t want it removed entirely or reworked from the ground up.