[meta] Policy for dealing with users suspected/guilty of mass-downvote harassment?

Kaj_Sotala

Below is a message I just got from jackk. Some specifics have been redacted 1) so that we can discuss general policy rather than the details of this specific case 2) because presumption of innocence, just in case there happens to be an innocuous explanation to this.

Hi Kaj_Sotala,

I'm Jack, one of the Trike devs. I'm messaging you because you're the moderator who commented most recently. A while back the user [REDACTED 1] asked if Trike could look into retributive downvoting against his account. I've done that, and it looks like [REDACTED 2] has downvoted at least [over half of REDACTED 1's comments, amounting to hundreds of downvotes] ([REDACTED 1]'s next-largest downvoter is [REDACTED 3] at -15).

What action to take is a community problem, not a technical one, so we'd rather leave that up to the moderators. Some options:

1. Ask [REDACTED 2] for the story behind these votes
2. Use the "admin" account (which exists for sending scripted messages, &c.) to apply an upvote to each downvoted post
3. Apply a karma award to [REDACTED 1]'s account. This would fix the karma damage but not the sorting of individual comments
4. Apply a negative karma award to [REDACTED 2]'s account. This makes him pay for false downvotes twice over. This isn't possible in the current code, but it's an easy fix
5. Ban [REDACTED 2]

For future reference, it's very easy for Trike to look at who downvoted someone's account, so if you get questions about downvoting in the future I can run the same report.

If you need to verify my identity before you take action, let me know and we'll work something out.

-- Jack

So... thoughts? I have mod powers, but when I was granted them I was basically just told to use them to fight spam; there was never any discussion of any other policy, and I don't feel like I have the authority to decide on the suitable course of action without consulting the rest of the community.

Hi Kaj_Sotala,

I'm Jack, one of the Trike devs. I'm messaging you because you're the moderator who commented most recently. A while back the user [REDACTED 1] asked if Trike could look into retributive downvoting against his account. I've done that, and it looks like [REDACTED 2] has downvoted at least [over half of REDACTED 1's comments, amounting to hundreds of downvotes] ([REDACTED 1]'s next-largest downvoter is [REDACTED 3] at -15).

What action to take is a community problem, not a technical one, so we'd rather leave that up to the moderators. Some options:

1. Ask [REDACTED 2] for the story behind these votes
2. Use the "admin" account (which exists for sending scripted messages, &c.) to apply an upvote to each downvoted post
3. Apply a karma award to [REDACTED 1]'s account. This would fix the karma damage but not the sorting of individual comments
4. Apply a negative karma award to [REDACTED 2]'s account. This makes him pay for false downvotes twice over. This isn't possible in the current code, but it's an easy fix
5. Ban [REDACTED 2]

For future reference, it's very easy for Trike to look at who downvoted someone's account, so if you get questions about downvoting in the future I can run the same report.

If you need to verify my identity before you take action, let me know and we'll work something out.

-- Jack

As a Bayesian, you should count not a user's downvote, but P(downvote | user, facts about the post). If user X downvotes half of all posts, each downvote is 1 bit of evidence. If user X downvotes one out of 16 posts, each downvote is 4 bits of evidence.

The tricky part is how you combine facts about the post with the prior over all posts in cases where user X hasn't voted on many of user Y's posts. What if user X downvotes 1 comment in 50, and they've only voted on one of Y's comments before, and down-voted it? I could talk about how to do that correctly, but in the case of mass downvotes this is by definition not the case.

So, the site should report not sum of downvotes and upvotes, but evidence for and evidence against the utility of a post. Users could then choose to mass-downvote legitimately, knowing that would mean that each of their downvotes would count for less.

(I would be cautious about incorporating the poster's prior! I think voters already incorporate that in their voting.)

To work properly, this system should have the voting options "upvote, meh, downvote", so that we can use P(downvote | voted) rather than P(downvote | viewed) or (downvotes / (upvotes+downvotes)). The latter could motivate people to vote nearly everything up so that their downvotes would have more weight. The votes of a person who votes seldom give more evidence than the votes of a person who votes on comment.

(At the very least it would help to display "+3/-2" instead of "1 point". Yes, I know you can compute that by hovering over the score to get % positive. In which case there's not much reason not to just display +/- votes all the time!)

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[meta] Policy for dealing with users suspected/guilty of mass-downvote harassment?

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[meta] Policy for dealing with users suspected/guilty of mass-downvote harassment?

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