http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=11144588


in reply to RFC: Policy regarding abuses of the voting system

Confessional

For transparency’s sake, the tale. (Though I have a vague memory of talking about this previously.)

The monk who shall not be named *always* rubbed me wrong. Because he seemed senior in credentials and standing I didn’t say much of anything for years. Neither did I downvote because it felt purely personal at the time and I downvoted infrequently in that era anyway.

When it slowly evolved into acrimony, wasted chances, abuse, lies, and I had evolved my chops to know what was what, *and* years of conversation and warnings went unheeded… I wrote a bot to find every post from that monk which I had not voted on. This was years ago. It was something like 1,400 as I recall. The bot was well behaved.

I used the list to visit batches of posts in the browser from time to time. I downvoted 99+% of them. I upvoted some as I recall but, as I had long warned, only posts that were as good as anything top monks write daily. That was maybe two or three of them.

I try to downvote for purely professional reasons but will sometimes downvote for personality and tone if it isn’t accompanied by technical merit; this confession covers both because the monk’s older posts often had undeserved high-ish reputation points. I consider downvotes one of the better features in any social/forum platform. Side note: I generally upvote even poor nodes of newer users to encourage participation.