There was a discussion about unexplained anonymous serial down-voting in the C++ room this morning (starting here [1]). The user affected by it explained it to me thus [2]:
It started on a particular Q, Wherein, I had a rub-in with a particular user over one of my answer. Immediately,within seconds, there was surge of downvotes(>10) on me,I queried this user in the comments about it & this user agreed it was him who downvoted and bragged it was within his rights to do so & that SO policy allows him, We had an heated argument over it, following which the user deleted his comment.
On that ocassion the Fraud detection algorithm detected and reversed the downvotes.
After the incident I have been on the receiving end of regular serial revenge downvoting but that user seems to have wisened up & learned to game the system, The downvotes happen but just enough to not trigger the Fraud detection.
Few noticable ones:Oct 6: 3 Downvotes
Oct 5: 3 Downvotes
Sep 21: 5 Downvotes
Sep 22: 2 Downvotes
All anonymous, with no real reasoning.Every time I see the downvotes happening, I can see this user is active and on almost all occassions I could match his vote casting pattern with the downvoting against me.
Even yesterday,He posted a wrong answer & I just pointed the incorrectness(without even downvoting) & the response is a quick 3 downvotes(which you upvoted) where in there was no reason for any.
I have flagged for moderator attention & the mod said there is nothing they can do to write to team@stackoverflow.com. I haven't written them there yet, but this whole situation is rather disturbing. So that's the story, without the who part in it, but i sure know who the Ass hole is.
Note that I know that these are only mosquito bites to Als' rep [3], but I still believe that such users are severely damaging this site's usefulness, not to mention its reputation. (This affects answers to questions where one down-vote makes a considerable change to which answer is up-voted most and thus seen as the right one by others searching for solutions to the same problem.)
This user knows exactly what he is doing. He is trying hard to fly under the vote fraud script's radar and thus keeps it always along the edge of "but I consider those wrong!". (However, the half a dozen questions and answers I have checked which were last affected by this are all factually right and at the very least deserve no down-vote; some deserve up-votes instead.) He takes out is incertitude on others, repeatedly, and Als might not even be his only victim.
IMO such users should be banned for a while, and for all eternity if the repeat the offense after the ban is lifted.
We sometimes give a warning the first time, depending on how outwardly hostile their current (and past) behavior might be. In quite a few cases, no actual malice was intended, and I'll explain.
There are cases where someone happens across an answer that is just really questionable. The person then goes to the author's history and looks at other answers, while voting down things that they feel are also wrong. This is not what people should be doing, but in many cases our 'first offenders' are actually trying to be helpful by adding their vote so the best information comes to the top. They aren't going on a revenge pattern, and the votes really aren't about the person, they're really about the content.
The problem is, the evidence this leaves (as far as a user's view goes) is identical to what you'd see if someone was just going off on a temper tantrum. This is an exception that is rather difficult to handle automatically, so we (moderators) are here to apply some human intelligence and take the appropriate action.
We will suspend anyone that goes on an outwardly hostile rampage for at least a week, perhaps longer, depending on their history. We're quite good at figuring out the difference, so alert us to it as soon as you see it by flagging. We absolutely can, should and will remove disruptive individuals from the community for a period of time.
The point being, we really need to look at it. We can't have the system dishing out harsh suspensions to new(er) users that thought they were doing what we want them to do.
In the beginning when I downvoted the system popped up a message urging me to explain why I do so. The system also seems to count my upvotes to questions and answers and points out when I neglect to vote on questions.
Would it be so hard for the system to pick up when I'm downvoting more than, say: three posts of one user and pop up a message explaining that revenge downvoting will be caught and offenders prosecuted?! (No hint at any mechanisms needed.) I bet this would reduce 90% of this crap immediately.
The rest can then be dealt with in the way it is dealt with now: users flag when they are at the receiving end of such a rampage, and humans with access to the actual data look at it and decide.
Agreed. The problem with running a script is that scripts can be gamed, people can learn how they work and work around them. Scripts aren't intelligent, they don't learn.
In my opinion, users who have been detected to have engaged in serial downvoting should be forced to leave a 50-character comment for all downvotes for a significant period, e.g. a month, and have their fraud detection threshold reduced permanently, with bans occurring from a second infringement.
It's one thing to say that people in general can downvote without commenting, but when you start abusing the system, then you should have to justify them.
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laden comments in that case. I think lowering the threshold for these users is a great idea. It may happen already, for all we know, though. - jonsca
Agreed. Like with any other deliberately destructive behaviour, serial downvoting should lead to a ban - for a short period (like a week) the first time, with penalties increasing for repeat offenders and sock-puppeteers.
If you're seeing a pattern of downvoting, flag for moderator attention. In the flag, indicate that you also believe this user has a history of engaging in such a pattern.
Enough flags of that type (substantiated by evidence of course), and those users will absolutely be suspended.
Back in the day, when SO was young, and Meta SO didn't yet exist, I would occasionally log on to find some user had gone and down-voted a bunch of my posts.
It hurt. Not my rep, because trying to seriously hurt someone's reputation by down-voting them out of spite is quite difficult. But it hurt my pride. Especially seeing questions down-voted, because I don't ask very many questions, and the ones I do ask tended to be on niche topics that didn't catch a lot of votes.
The anti-fraud scripts helped a bit. As irritating as seeing a handful of posts down-voted out of the blue can be, having to sit and watch while someone goes through and down-votes 20 of your top answers one after another, while you can do nothing to stop them, is worse - and now days, that takes some amount of cleverness to pull off.
Realizing that I was indirectly to blame helped a lot. It's really not necessary to leave a comment every time you down-vote or close-vote someone's post, and when it is it's usually worth being a bit tactful. There's never any good reason to tell someone that you down-voted them. And once you've explained the problem, there comes a point where you're not really helping anyone by continuing to argue [1]... You've made your case; some folks you just can't reach. And in my experience, the fewer knock-down-drag-out arguments I got into, the fewer people decided to make down-voting me their business. Imagine that...
Recognizing that I'm also a serial down-voter at times gave me some perspective. Oh, I don't follow anyone around down-voting their stuff in retribution for some perceived slight. But if I see a particularly bad question, or especially a bad answer, I'll often check the user's profile to see if they've been doing the same thing elsewhere - and as a result, hand out a few down-votes to them in quick succession. From my perspective, I'm just doing what I'm supposed to do: down-ranking posts that aren't useful. But from their perspective, it probably looks like someone's got it in for them.
But y'know what helped me deal with this more than anything else? Realizing that one vote (per post) doesn't matter. Even if it is completely misguided, or out-and-out malicious. Those questions I was so concerned about years ago, to the point where I made several of them Community Wiki just to discourage the voters? If I'd taken the long view, I would have gotten something like 500 rep points from just one of them [2] - the handful of down-votes I was so discouraged about are nothing compared to the up-votes received in the years that followed.
If your post is any good, it'll be viewed by hundreds or thousands of future readers, and voted on by enough of them to more than obliterate any ill effects wrought by a malicious voter.
Flag for a moderator, email team@, rant in chat... Whatever helps you deal with it here and now. But at the end of the day, don't stress about it. If the system depended on every single voter voting "properly" it would have been dead before you ever signed on. Serial down-voting is sad, for you of course, but mostly for the person doing it... But in the grand scheme of things, it really doesn't make that much difference.
Might I recommend a nice cup of tea?
[1] http://xkcd.com/386/We can't do anything about it
and hence this follows,I do not understand what the big problem and the big discussion about it,since @TimPost already commented saying he pretty much found the source.Why not just stop the bickering,wait and let Tim come back with his findings? - Alok Save
One way to automatically distinguish between the case Tim mentioned, of identifying a user that is poisoning the well with bad answers and dealing out well-deserved downvotes, vs revenge voting, would be to check for correlation between those votes and those cast by users with high reputation in associated tags. A user consistently voting opposite to high rep users is likely on a revenge spree. And false positives at worst identify users who don't have the expertise needed to correctly wield the voting privilege.
Finding users whose votes are significantly correlated against high-rep users might justify requiring them to defend some of those votes to mods. Such comments don't have to be made public, but would assist with making a decision.
They're just downvotes. Post a good answer; one upvote cancels out five downvotes. Move on with your life. Anonymous downvoting is important to the system for a variety of reasons which I don't have time to search for and link to. Requiring serial downvoters to comment is not the answer -- the people are bad apples and requiring them to comment will just encourage them to leave bad comments. More automation is not the answer. Ignoring idiots who downvote for no reason (and flagging for moderator attention if you are really bothered by it) is.
Let's see if we can summarize this event without all the emotion.
At time zero, two people had a testy exchange of comments.
Starting at time one, one of those people noticed a pattern of downvotes appearing on their posts. Those downvotes were no more or less anonymous than any other downvote. The recipient, suspecting that the other person was stinging them in retaliation for the comment exchange, received an actual admission of same from the perpetrator.
OK, well, this is really easy. You send mail to team, or use a flag, and something happens. This is the unusual easy case because of the open admission.
Nothing to see here, people, just move along. Of course, you have no right to know the details of the enforcement operation.
The more troubling case is when you don't receive a 'postcard' explaining that you are the subject of antisocial behavior. What do you do if you suddenly notice a series of downvotes on otherwise ordinary posts that have been sitting out there minding their own business?
Well, as I discovered in the last few days, you ... email the team.
Absent some evidence of a ton of this sort of thing happening to unsuspecting victims, I don't see what else we need here. We have mods, we have flags, we have email to team@.
One user cannot cast 10 downvotes.
The context of the Q isserial downvoters
and if you read the Q it talks about serial downvoters revenge downvoting anonymously. - Alok Save