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IlyaShpitser comments on LessWrong 2.0 - Less Wrong
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Listen, you have people like Eugene with their army of upvoting/downvoting sockpuppets, etc. Karma may have some signal (related to "what the community likes" which is neither here nor there) if it was policed, but it isn't.
But is there an etc.? Sure, we have one not huge sockpuppet army which pops up once in a while, but besides that I don't see karma as much abused here.
Of course the real question is whether it signifies anything except mob likes. In many areas allowing the likes to lead you is a really bad idea.
It's like cockroaches, for every one you see, how many do you not see?
Trust me, if you have a cockroach-infested kitchen, you know it, even if you don't see that many roaches scurrying about :-/
Agreed.
It isn't, yet.
How would you go about policing it?
One simple approach is leaderboards, similar to Top Contributors, 30 Days, that's something like Top Upvoters, 30 Days and Top Downvoters, 30 Days. This would give them a sense of who's driving karma shifts (and would identify potential problems, like VoiceOfRa massdownvoting people, as they're happening).
It seems likely these should only be available to the police (i.e. the mods)--you don't want people voting just to make their score higher.
A more direct approach deals with the vote graph directly. Serial upvote and downvote detection, as done by Stack Overflow, relies on the graph, but sockpuppets are probably more noticeable by something like voting cliques or vote distributions. It would be interesting to take other people's vote relationships with me (i.e. one person may have upvoted 100 of my posts and comments and downvoted 10 of them) and figure out what sort of distribution that takes on, and then see if there are users with odd distributions (of their votes on others or others votes on them). A well-known similar approach is Benford's Law; if one has received a disproportionate number of votes from a small number of users, or given a disproportionate number to a small number of users, then it is likely that some sort of sockpuppetry is going on.
If you can run queries on the backend database, it's rather easy to discover voting shenanigans. The problem, as I understand it, is that right now mods have to ask Trike specific questions and Trike isn't speedy about getting back to them.
That said, if we can define the characteristics of some standard queries we would like exposed (for example, " Top Upvoters, 30 Days" and "Top Downvoters, 30 Days" as Vaniver mentioned) Trike might be willing to expose those queries to LW admins.
Or they might not. The way to find out is to ask, but we should only bother asking if we actually want them to do so. So discussing it internally in advance of testing those limits seems sensible.