This should be considered as a possibly better solution. People who can’t be trusted with algorithmic control of visibility of others’ posts may still have worthwhile posts of their own to contribute.
That said, I’m not sure I can wholeheartedly endorse it. Well-kept gardens die by pacifism. A person who has demonstrated active hostility toward others in the community perhaps shouldn’t be regarded as a good-faith contributor. Kaj has construed this as a harassment problem rather than a bad data problem — it’s not that Eugine was feeding erroneous data into a ranking algorithm whose output we care about; it’s that he was (admittedly) trying to drive people off the site whom he didn’t approve of.
Right. And it seems like a non-central application of the harassment clause. As a result, he applied the measures standard for a harassment, which are not the best ones in this situation.
Part of the problem is that the cited policy is phrased as a nonbinding “deletion policy” (a discussion of cases when moderators might delete posts or comments) and not a “conduct policy” (discussing acceptable use of the site in general). The closest we seem to have to the latter is the “Site Etiquette and Social Norms” section of the FAQ, which does discuss some unacceptable uses of the voting mechanism but does not contemplate that someone might go so far as to use it to intentionally drive users off the site. That may not be a failure of imagination — it may be an avoidance of the “Don’t stuff beans up your nose!” problem. Spelling out lots of ways to abuse the system provides a malicious or mischievous user with a list of things to do.
In any event, it’s a bad idea to cooperate with a defectbot.
This should be considered as a possibly better solution. People who can’t be trusted with algorithmic control of visibility of others’ posts may still have worthwhile posts of their own to contribute.
That said, I’m not sure I can wholeheartedly endorse it. Well-kept gardens die by pacifism. A person who has demonstrated active hostility toward others in the community perhaps shouldn’t be regarded as a good-faith contributor. Kaj has construed this as a harassment problem rather than a bad data problem — it’s not that Eugine was feeding erroneous data into a ranking algorithm whose output we care about; it’s that he was (admittedly) trying to drive people off the site whom he didn’t approve of.
Right. And it seems like a non-central application of the harassment clause. As a result, he applied the measures standard for a harassment, which are not the best ones in this situation.
Part of the problem is that the cited policy is phrased as a nonbinding “deletion policy” (a discussion of cases when moderators might delete posts or comments) and not a “conduct policy” (discussing acceptable use of the site in general). The closest we seem to have to the latter is the “Site Etiquette and Social Norms” section of the FAQ, which does discuss some unacceptable uses of the voting mechanism but does not contemplate that someone might go so far as to use it to intentionally drive users off the site. That may not be a failure of imagination — it may be an avoidance of the “Don’t stuff beans up your nose!” problem. Spelling out lots of ways to abuse the system provides a malicious or mischievous user with a list of things to do.
In any event, it’s a bad idea to cooperate with a defectbot.