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 retracted it primarily because I read more of the thread and realized that the idea was too similar to another discussion which had already been brought up, which made the initial comment out of place and other parts repetitive. At that point, I was left with a "Since this has been brought up before, rather than posting it as a new idea, let me just retract it and upvote the other person who suggested it."
But that being said, I'm not sure I fully understand your abuse concerns. If someone wanted to abuse the system, they can just sockpuppet up their karma without any other people. Using this method is substantially less prone to abuse since there is another person involved, and it seems to parallel things which would not be considered abusive. If you are asking for too much positive karma, presumably the other person would say so. (It does cost them a small amount of time/effort to karma repair you, after all.)
However, I suppose if you wanted to be completely sure you were not abusing the system, you could just ask your friend "Could you read all of my recent posts and let me know your thoughts?" If your friend saw "Wait, these are all at -1, but they're all perfectly fine." they would probably systematically upvote you even if you didn't actually ask for upvotes. Asking for a friend to look at your work by itself does not seem like it could be considered abusive under any reasonable set of rules.
What do you think of that alternative?
It seems better, but does seem to lead to a risk of echo-chamber situations.
Being human is hard.