Several people posted recently in a thread on women, mostly espousing feminist views - only to find that someone had declined to respond to their post, but instead browsed their history and downvoted every single comment or article they had ever posted.
I have two questions:
1. Why would you come to a site like this and pollute the karma system? How does it make you smarter? How does it make anyone else on the site smarter?
2. What would be a good technical workaround? In my mind, some system that detects mass-downvoting and flags a user for review would be preferable, but what should happen then? Should the system be more lenient to higher-karma posters? Who should perform the review process? What should be done with those whom the reviewer ascertains are abusing the karma system? I would prefer some kind of lesson that is more corrective than retributive - it seems to me that people who would perform this behavior are exactly the sort of people who need some of the lessons that this site provides. Any ideas?
I think flagging for moderator attention is far superior to any automated response. I really like JoshuaZ's opposite approach, and I have no problem with someone repeatedly encountering a troll, and then going back and downvoting other trolling comments selectively. What I have a problem with is retributive downvoting without regard to the content of the comments being downvoted.
I'd be pretty happy to leave appropriate responses to moderator discussion. My suggestion would be something along the lines of undoing all downvotes that person made within the recent past (past week? moderator discretion seems appropriate), and removing their ability to downvote for some time into the future (a week or so?), long enough for them to cool off consider things from a different perspective. I would hope that the moderators would send a message explaining their action in such cases, even if it was only a description of what behavior was problematic and a boilerplate explanation of how mass downvotes hurt the site.
How do you deal with the induced increase in censorship-trolling noise? With political differences among moderators? With increased moderator fatigue?
No, the correct solution space is the realm of automated applied psychology.