Re:Ask HN: Is it fair game to downvote someone's comments in...
by buro9 on Saturday April 25, 2015 @11:23AM
(#9438536)
A number of things could be done, though the long-term effect of them might not be desired.
Perhaps the threshold whereby you are permitted to downvote should be raised.
Perhaps HN could allow karma to be 'spent' as downvotes. The act of downvoting would be something that costs you, and unless you're a top 100 commenter that's probably going to make you hesitate.
HN probably already check for and punish the malicious downvoter, i.e. so-and-so said something that I didn't like and so I'm going to go through their historical comments downvoting all. That stuff is really easy to detect.
HN could probably check whether downvotes given by a person occur on a few topics, or for a few individuals. These are probably slightly angry downvotes, they could be reversed.
Ultimately though they'd hit a grey area. There are obvious and easy things to deal with, and once those low hanging fruits are grabbed then everything else is nuanced, it has context and requires understanding to moderate fairly.
Perhaps the threshold whereby you are permitted to downvote should be raised.
Perhaps HN could allow karma to be 'spent' as downvotes. The act of downvoting would be something that costs you, and unless you're a top 100 commenter that's probably going to make you hesitate.
HN probably already check for and punish the malicious downvoter, i.e. so-and-so said something that I didn't like and so I'm going to go through their historical comments downvoting all. That stuff is really easy to detect.
HN could probably check whether downvotes given by a person occur on a few topics, or for a few individuals. These are probably slightly angry downvotes, they could be reversed.
Ultimately though they'd hit a grey area. There are obvious and easy things to deal with, and once those low hanging fruits are grabbed then everything else is nuanced, it has context and requires understanding to moderate fairly.