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?
Well, the best I feel comfortable doing is read through all your posts (which seem pretty reasonable, btw) and upvote everything that's at 0 or lower, unless it's particularly egregious (so far nothing is).
One thing that this whole process is teaching me is an appreciation for some of the arguments made here ("karma isn't that important on the whole"), but in the case of a good post not being read because it's too low-karma, I think karma is seriously important and deserves further attention.
Thank you very much for taking the time to do that! I promise to do likewise once time permits. I should log off LW for now in order to get some work done...