Anyone got evidence of other topics that provoke mass-downvoting?
Flash downvoting happens occasionally, and people post about it once in a while. I tend to get it when talking about MWI and instrumentalism, for example. I recall others mention it in connection with other topics. I agree that it is an underhanded tactics and a nuisance, but probably no more than that, and is hardly worth the admins’ time or the potential effort of the code change required to log every vote or to limit the number of targeted downvotes per user per day or something, or to do anything semi-automated. There already is a trivial inconvenience of not being able to access the vote button from the user view, and I don’t believe that a determined attacker will find it difficult to bypass more serious measures.
If this is not the kind of abuse of the system that a moderator should invest time in dealing with, where do you think the line should be drawn for their intervention?
A utilitarian approach would be to weigh the benefits of dealing with rare occurrences like this against those of other useful tasks, like getting bugs fixed, features added and what not. Not being one of the admins, I have no idea what the pressures are.
The reason why it might be a good idea for the admins to stomp on such behaviour isn’t just that the behaviour is harmful in itself, it’s to establish a culture of not doing that sort of thing.
The votes must all be logged already (or something functionally equivalent) because the system already knows to stop you upvoting or downvoting the same thing twice. Providing a UI to make it easy for admins to look for mass-downvoting would be the trickier thing, and indeed it might not be worth the effort. Though, on the whole, I think it probably would be, in order to establish LW as the sort of place where that kind of thing just doesn’t happen.
Flash downvoting happens occasionally, and people post about it once in a while. I tend to get it when talking about MWI and instrumentalism, for example. I recall others mention it in connection with other topics. I agree that it is an underhanded tactics and a nuisance, but probably no more than that, and is hardly worth the admins’ time or the potential effort of the code change required to log every vote or to limit the number of targeted downvotes per user per day or something, or to do anything semi-automated. There already is a trivial inconvenience of not being able to access the vote button from the user view, and I don’t believe that a determined attacker will find it difficult to bypass more serious measures.
If this is not the kind of abuse of the system that a moderator should invest time in dealing with, where do you think the line should be drawn for their intervention?
A utilitarian approach would be to weigh the benefits of dealing with rare occurrences like this against those of other useful tasks, like getting bugs fixed, features added and what not. Not being one of the admins, I have no idea what the pressures are.
The reason why it might be a good idea for the admins to stomp on such behaviour isn’t just that the behaviour is harmful in itself, it’s to establish a culture of not doing that sort of thing.
The votes must all be logged already (or something functionally equivalent) because the system already knows to stop you upvoting or downvoting the same thing twice. Providing a UI to make it easy for admins to look for mass-downvoting would be the trickier thing, and indeed it might not be worth the effort. Though, on the whole, I think it probably would be, in order to establish LW as the sort of place where that kind of thing just doesn’t happen.