I guess a simple test would be: “if I saw this post and didn’t know who had written it, would I still downvote it?”. If yes, then it’s fine, even if you did do the downvoting in large numbers. Because you’d be making your decision based on the quality of the specific comment rather than e.g. a general dislike of the person’s other comments.
(This heuristic isn’t quite perfect, given that knowing the writer of a comment does sometimes provide information that helps evaluate the comment better—e.g. if there’s someone who I know to have a background in physics and they tell me that I’m wrong about a question of physics, I have more reason to take that seriously than if the comment came from the Time Cube guy. But the rough idea should be helpful anyway, I hope.)
As for the question of “how do I tell whether someone really has applied that test”… well, I have some thoughts about that, but I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea to give a detailed explanation of the methodology, since that would allow people to game whatever tests I have in mind.
I guess a simple test would be: “if I saw this post and didn’t know who had written it, would I still downvote it?”. If yes, then it’s fine, even if you did do the downvoting in large numbers. Because you’d be making your decision based on the quality of the specific comment rather than e.g. a general dislike of the person’s other comments.
(This heuristic isn’t quite perfect, given that knowing the writer of a comment does sometimes provide information that helps evaluate the comment better—e.g. if there’s someone who I know to have a background in physics and they tell me that I’m wrong about a question of physics, I have more reason to take that seriously than if the comment came from the Time Cube guy. But the rough idea should be helpful anyway, I hope.)
As for the question of “how do I tell whether someone really has applied that test”… well, I have some thoughts about that, but I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea to give a detailed explanation of the methodology, since that would allow people to game whatever tests I have in mind.