Discussed here.
Short answer: no.
Longer answer: Voting directly from user pages was taken away. People have also suggested limits on the amount of karma you can add/subtract from a user in a given amount of time, but if one is implemented it will likely be bigger than 16 (I’d like the ability to downvote two posts by the same user in the same day.)
But you have 5000 karma. I really wouldn’t worry over 16, or 160.
Why not just disallow the casting of more than one downvote by the same person within a five-minute period? How many spite-voters are going to be dedicated enough to wait around for an hour just to blitz someone’s karma?
Because sometimes I read multiple comments in the space of five minutes, and it’s not unthinkable I might want to downvote more than one of them. Any rate-limiter would have to be carefully considered not to impinge on ordinary non-pathological users. This is perhaps more important than fighting spite-voters.
This is essentially the same trade-off DRM faces. I would say that spite-voting isn’t a large enough problem to need a technical solution unless somebody’s being hugely egregious, and if someone’s being hugely egregious, there are admins that can step in, right?
I would say that spite-voting isn’t a large enough problem to need a technical solution unless somebody’s being hugely egregious, and if someone’s being hugely egregious, there are admins that can step in, right?
There are admins that can step in, but I’m not sure if they have in past egregious cases. Aside from Will Newsome, I think there have been other significant instances of mass downvoting (at least PJ Eby, maybe others), and (correct me if I’m mistaken) I don’t recall anything being directly done about either in the end, except the removal of voting buttons from userpages after Will brought it up. That was an improvement, but it’s still clearly possible, and if someone were sufficiently motivated, it would be pretty easily scriptable.
Yeah, I wouldn’t have proposed hard limits, I was thinking more of an automatic (i.e. not involving manually poking around in the database) means of allowing the administrators to check on large-scale suspicious voting and reverse it if necessary. (And, as I said, I’m by no means worried about my 16 precious votes (though I’d be starting to get concerned by 160), but this incident reminded me of the general problem and I wanted to check if I had missed any changes to how such things are handled.)
I might support just making all votes public; since on LW they (are supposed to) mean “more/less of this” rather than “I like/don’t like you” or “I agree/disagree”, I’m not sure I see any reason why that information should not be associated with the people whose opinions they represent, since that is relevant information as well. (Though of course some people prefer going in the other direction to make things consistent, hence the anti-kibitzer. But if the anti-kibitzer can be opt-in, perhaps so should not seeing other people’s votes.)
But then, I vaguely remember that having been discussed before, so I’ll see if I can locate said discussion(s) before attempting to start another one.
Discussed here. Short answer: no. Longer answer: Voting directly from user pages was taken away. People have also suggested limits on the amount of karma you can add/subtract from a user in a given amount of time, but if one is implemented it will likely be bigger than 16 (I’d like the ability to downvote two posts by the same user in the same day.)
But you have 5000 karma. I really wouldn’t worry over 16, or 160.
Why not just disallow the casting of more than one downvote by the same person within a five-minute period? How many spite-voters are going to be dedicated enough to wait around for an hour just to blitz someone’s karma?
Because sometimes I read multiple comments in the space of five minutes, and it’s not unthinkable I might want to downvote more than one of them. Any rate-limiter would have to be carefully considered not to impinge on ordinary non-pathological users. This is perhaps more important than fighting spite-voters.
This is essentially the same trade-off DRM faces. I would say that spite-voting isn’t a large enough problem to need a technical solution unless somebody’s being hugely egregious, and if someone’s being hugely egregious, there are admins that can step in, right?
There are admins that can step in, but I’m not sure if they have in past egregious cases. Aside from Will Newsome, I think there have been other significant instances of mass downvoting (at least PJ Eby, maybe others), and (correct me if I’m mistaken) I don’t recall anything being directly done about either in the end, except the removal of voting buttons from userpages after Will brought it up. That was an improvement, but it’s still clearly possible, and if someone were sufficiently motivated, it would be pretty easily scriptable.
Yeah, I wouldn’t have proposed hard limits, I was thinking more of an automatic (i.e. not involving manually poking around in the database) means of allowing the administrators to check on large-scale suspicious voting and reverse it if necessary. (And, as I said, I’m by no means worried about my 16 precious votes (though I’d be starting to get concerned by 160), but this incident reminded me of the general problem and I wanted to check if I had missed any changes to how such things are handled.)
I might support just making all votes public; since on LW they (are supposed to) mean “more/less of this” rather than “I like/don’t like you” or “I agree/disagree”, I’m not sure I see any reason why that information should not be associated with the people whose opinions they represent, since that is relevant information as well. (Though of course some people prefer going in the other direction to make things consistent, hence the anti-kibitzer. But if the anti-kibitzer can be opt-in, perhaps so should not seeing other people’s votes.)
But then, I vaguely remember that having been discussed before, so I’ll see if I can locate said discussion(s) before attempting to start another one.