RE: The Flag, The Down Vote... my semi-frequent update to this idea... hopefully those in favor of the downvote read it
Nice post and the comments reveal the trickiness of the problem. I'm just thinking that this is a case of a few bad apples; the vast majority of the community would like to be able to address the abuse. I think a large part of the problem is that most are unaware of who the culprits are in order to even mobilise themselves into action against it.
Can I just summarize where I think we are to help break things down and simplify the issues from what I’ve read:
- We currently have 2 problems of abuse, the upvote and the downvote systems
- The downvote system is only in place to mitigate the abuses of the upvote system.
- The upvote system is only mainly abused by whales and bots.
- The whales and bots are the problem.
- Solve the whale and bot problem, then downvote can be removed.
Is this correct? I’m not a techie so please bear with my ignorance but is it not possible to totally ban/impede bots? Can we not have some kind of unique human thing attached to the voting mechanism? I’m probably guessing not, as I’m pretty sure someone would have thought of it, but thought worth asking.
Secondly the whale problem; the above post by @lifeworship gave me some clue as to how we might go about this:
“i have created, for myself a practice i call flag mining. i spend at least an hour a week finding flagged posts and seeing what's in them. normally if i see something flagged, i just move on. sometimes, paying deliberate attention to only flagged posts has yielded some interesting results. i can see patterns in what gets flagged out of opinion. i also get to see which whales chronically misbehave. sometimes i just find cool posts.”
Is it not possible to publish on site the instances of flag/downvote instances? Maybe the top 100 by damage done to the reputation/potential earnings etc? Can this be done algorithmically so that at least the larger community would be made aware of the larger abusers? I think this could help motivate the 99% to address the abuses of the 1%? Would the threat of thousands of minnows attacking the main abusers have a positive effect? The 99% would then have the power to make their own minds up and help redress the balance. The consensus of the majority would then play out, rather than the minority.
Just a few top of my head thoughts…..