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?
The problem is that once you give humans a number they have some control over they will try to modify it and care about it. Even if they only care a little bit. This is to a large extent how MMOs work for example. Prior discussion of this issue on Less Wrong which I can't find at the moment resulted in the Kill Everyone Project being pointed out as an extreme real life example. And since for karma one only has partial control, this essentially amounts to randomized reinforcement, which is one of the most addictive forms of reinforcement.