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?
Perhaps you could convince someone who wasn't very interested in the discussion to blindly upvote all of your posts, to counteract it? You are right that this has an impact on ongoing discussions, but it can also be undone with the help of a kindly stranger.
I feel like correcting an abuse of a system by further abusing the system is a bad precedent to set
If you feel this is a viable solution, you could have simply implemented it, rather than suggesting that I convince someone to implement.