Currently the limit is set at 10; it would be fairly easy to change it to 100 or to 1000. The problem is that we don’t know what accounts Eugine has yet, and so even if we set the limit at 1k he might still have twenty accounts available to downvote things. Once we get the ability to investigate comment voting, then we can keep the limit fairly low.
One problem with setting the limit too high is that the voter base becomes unbalanced in a problematic way; is it really useful to have downvotes if only ~50 people can use them, but ~5000 people can use upvotes?
Yes, it seems to me that would be useful. Concretely, it might make the difference between whether clearly-bad-but-not-ban-worthy content ends up at +1 or −2. If >10k isn’t enough people, something like >3k would still come with a pretty minimal risk of abuse.
edit: On rereading your comment, it sounds like you’re saying a high threshold for downvoting has problems relative to a low threshold. I agree with this, but what we currently have is no downvoting. I suspect the ideal policy in terms of site quality (but not politics/PR/attractiveness to newcomers) is a medium-sized whitelist of voters selected by a trusted, anonymous entity, with no voting (up or down) outside this whitelist.
Currently the limit is set at 10; it would be fairly easy to change it to 100 or to 1000. The problem is that we don’t know what accounts Eugine has yet, and so even if we set the limit at 1k he might still have twenty accounts available to downvote things. Once we get the ability to investigate comment voting, then we can keep the limit fairly low.
okay, so a temp measure until then… the test is cheap.
How about 10k?
One problem with setting the limit too high is that the voter base becomes unbalanced in a problematic way; is it really useful to have downvotes if only ~50 people can use them, but ~5000 people can use upvotes?
Yes, it seems to me that would be useful. Concretely, it might make the difference between whether clearly-bad-but-not-ban-worthy content ends up at +1 or −2. If >10k isn’t enough people, something like >3k would still come with a pretty minimal risk of abuse.
edit: On rereading your comment, it sounds like you’re saying a high threshold for downvoting has problems relative to a low threshold. I agree with this, but what we currently have is no downvoting. I suspect the ideal policy in terms of site quality (but not politics/PR/attractiveness to newcomers) is a medium-sized whitelist of voters selected by a trusted, anonymous entity, with no voting (up or down) outside this whitelist.
These two words do not match well.
Trusted by the site owners, anonymous to others. (This is not actually a practical suggestion, so it doesn’t matter.)
Yes, if you don’t net them. And in general, a +X -Y display is much more informative than a single number.