In seriousness, why would you deliberately evoke a hypothesis that you know is wildly unrealistic? Surely whatever the real reasons for the downvoting pattern are, they are relevant to your enquiry?
Perhaps “cabal who gathered to make a decision [to downvote]” is an overly ominous image.
However, we’ve seen cases where every one of someone’s comments has been downvoted in a short span of time, which is clearly not the typical reason for a downvoting.
It is possible the first downvote tends to attract further downvotes (by priming, for example), but an equally parsimonious explanation is that there are several people refreshing the comments page at a time and a subset of them dislike the content independently.
But you can still be very confident that actual collusion wasn’t involved, so you shouldn’t be talking as if it might have been.
EDIT: as always I’m keen to know why the downvote—thanks! My current theory is that they come across as hostile, which they weren’t meant to, but I’d value better data than my guesses.
In seriousness, why would you deliberately evoke a hypothesis that you know is wildly unrealistic? Surely whatever the real reasons for the downvoting pattern are, they are relevant to your enquiry?
Perhaps “cabal who gathered to make a decision [to downvote]” is an overly ominous image.
However, we’ve seen cases where every one of someone’s comments has been downvoted in a short span of time, which is clearly not the typical reason for a downvoting.
That’s the kind of thing I was asking about.
It is possible the first downvote tends to attract further downvotes (by priming, for example), but an equally parsimonious explanation is that there are several people refreshing the comments page at a time and a subset of them dislike the content independently.
But you can still be very confident that actual collusion wasn’t involved, so you shouldn’t be talking as if it might have been.
EDIT: as always I’m keen to know why the downvote—thanks! My current theory is that they come across as hostile, which they weren’t meant to, but I’d value better data than my guesses.