Have an active moderator who will look at suspected cases of mass downvoting in a timely manner (and then punish the downvoter and mod up the victim again)
It is our inability to implement this solution which necessitates all the other ones.
We don’t want to remove the ability to do mass downvoting. If someone posts 100 random Wikipedia articles in the belief that this provides insight, they should be downvoted. What we want to do is remove the ability to do mass downvoting based on the downvoter’s motivation. No automated process can detect motivation, so we can’t do that without using a moderator.
I think you may be using different definitions of “mass downvoting”. I think Jiro means downvoting many of one user’s comments with just one account. I think several people have “mass-downvoted” Clarity this week, but nobody complained.
How about having a limit to what proportion of another user’s downvotes are allowed to come from one user? So if clarity gets downvoted by 20 people there are no limits to how many votes they can get from each of them, but if it is only Nier going on a spree against a new user he pretty soon runs into 5% or whatever the limit is, and then can’t downvote that user any more.
OTOH a formal definition of what qualifies as mass downvoting could prevent bickering about whether a particular instance does. Dunno if the benefits would outweigh the costs, though.
My proposed solution would consist entirely of
Have an active moderator who will look at suspected cases of mass downvoting in a timely manner (and then punish the downvoter and mod up the victim again)
It is our inability to implement this solution which necessitates all the other ones.
That would be a poor use of human time. If we don’t want mass downvoting, remove the ability to do it.
We don’t want to remove the ability to do mass downvoting. If someone posts 100 random Wikipedia articles in the belief that this provides insight, they should be downvoted. What we want to do is remove the ability to do mass downvoting based on the downvoter’s motivation. No automated process can detect motivation, so we can’t do that without using a moderator.
Yes, but not necessarily by one person.
I think you may be using different definitions of “mass downvoting”. I think Jiro means downvoting many of one user’s comments with just one account. I think several people have “mass-downvoted” Clarity this week, but nobody complained.
I think someone who makes a huge mistake like posting 100 random Wikipedia articles will be sufficiently downvoted by a number of different people.
This process won’t be blocked by limiting how much individuals can downvote.
How about having a limit to what proportion of another user’s downvotes are allowed to come from one user? So if clarity gets downvoted by 20 people there are no limits to how many votes they can get from each of them, but if it is only Nier going on a spree against a new user he pretty soon runs into 5% or whatever the limit is, and then can’t downvote that user any more.
OTOH a formal definition of what qualifies as mass downvoting could prevent bickering about whether a particular instance does. Dunno if the benefits would outweigh the costs, though.