Background: Last week in the CB there was a discussion about how one or two people are complaining that they are being persecuted by a particular user who downvotes them as soon as they post. When investigated no evidence in voting patterns could be found to support the idea of such "persuction" downvoting.

Since this "kinda thing" comes out quite often, and occasionally I think I've been a "victim" too, albeit on a very sparse basis... I wonder, from the technological POV if and how one could set up an heuristic automated control for such a behaviour.

I should add by the way, that my own experience is a positive one insofar as the initial downvote is more often than not followed by many more positive votes in compensation, i.e. the complaint didn't come from me!

Indeed, as another interesting sociotechnological observation... I think that an initial downvote on a node, on the long run can benefit it, if it's a good node: as I wrote elsewhere I often start my visists to the Monastery from Worst Nodes, and upvote articles I find to be unjustly there. I bet others do too.