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I recently got a bunch of upvotes during a short period of time (it was a few minutes apart, so I know whoever did this actually bothered reading the answers), and aside from feeling good having provided the answers considered helpful, I know the rep itself will probably be gone soon, once the scripts kick in.

I've been wondering though, isn't the system too fine-tuned to fight serial downvoting here? I agree the cap should be in place to avoid the occasional malicious user with a sock puppet, but if a genuine user wants to upvote something he finds deserving, and is unaware of the cap, shouldn't he at least get a friendly notification that what he's doing is futile? Something along the lines of:

The system has detected that you voted for the same user multiple times. We are glad you find the content helpful and that you take an active part in making SO useful, but please be aware that further votes today to the same user would not be counted.

This was asked before in the context of downvotes, which I think is different. There's an answer from Martijn here, but I feel it doesn't provide a justification for this case. It basically just says: "No worries, the damage (of serial downvoting) will be fixed anyway."

Another consideration is that serial upvote reversal stains the profile permanently, see here.

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  • 2
    Anything that blocks or warns users about their actions is a good thing as it can educate them about how the system works up front. With it being an automatic process that runs once daily though on bulk data, I would wonder about how this would actually be implemented, as I would assume after every up vote an additional check would have to be performed to detect the serial voting, which may not have a massive impact, but it would have an impact on every up vote nonetheless. So I like the idea, but is the problem big enough to warrant the extra check on every vote?
    – Tanner
    Commented Apr 14, 2015 at 10:24
  • 3
    Congratulations, you got a fan club. I enjoy your posts, good stuff. No, wasn't me :) Commented Apr 14, 2015 at 11:03
  • 40
    Such a notification would be very helpful to people trying to guess the various thresholds of the voting fraud script in order to bypass it.
    – yannis
    Commented Apr 14, 2015 at 11:29
  • 4
    Paranoid worry: this would let people more easily determine what "sufficient time" between votes is to avoid being considered fraud.
    – TZHX
    Commented Apr 14, 2015 at 11:29
  • 14
    @Yannis,TZHX, yes, but people attempting that could already experiment with the system today, if they don't mind waiting 2 days between experiments (or maybe click the recalc button?). Alternatively, they could just read it somewhere in Meta-SO.
    – Leeor
    Commented Apr 14, 2015 at 12:22
  • 5
    I don't know about an immediate notification, but certainly whenever an upvote series gets reversed the upvoter should be notified that that didn't actually do anything. Getting some feedback is better than none. (Downvoters should still have their votes silently reversed.) Commented Apr 14, 2015 at 20:34
  • My opinion about this is irrelevant, but I'm sure many people will be following this thread closely.
    – Mast
    Commented Apr 14, 2015 at 20:36
  • 4
    I think there should be a warning for serial upvoting after 6 votes (6? More than 5, less than 10 but not much more than 5... it just felt right). When I first joined I was lucky enough to have Jon Skeet answer a question of mine and I accidentally (as in not purposefully triggering the serial voting script) upvoted like 15 of his posts. I had no idea it would harm him, I just wanted to thank him and the more of his answers I read the more I thought he was awesome. If there was a warning I would have stopped - I just had no clue.
    – Travis J
    Commented Apr 14, 2015 at 20:37
  • 3
    meta.stackexchange.com/questions/49651/…
    – Pekka
    Commented Apr 14, 2015 at 20:53
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    @Mast .. err, what on earth was the point of that comment? :P
    – miradulo
    Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 1:37
  • @DonkeyKong, I think he meant to say many users, not people :)
    – Leeor
    Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 6:12
  • 3
    @TravisJ, I like your idea, but insinuating Jon Skeet can be harmed by mere mortals is sacrilegious
    – Leeor
    Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 6:21
  • @DonkeyKong The point is this is a very interesting questions for which I don't know what the most appropriate action would be. Discussion about this is needed, making this a good question.
    – Mast
    Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 7:11
  • 1
    @Machavity It's not really serial upvoting (at least of the malicious kind) but gets treated as such. That's the point.
    – aw04
    Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 14:35
  • 1
    @Machavity, you can, but a large portion of the users are unaware of that issue and would no wait. The question is - should we notify them, or just let their actions drop.
    – Leeor
    Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 18:20

5 Answers 5

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Serial upvotes may come from a series of questions linked to a single problem the person is trying to solve. The fact that he upvotes every post he finds useful, be it from one author or several, is only to be commended.

The point of upvoting is not that the original author gets reputation, but that the content is marked as useful. First, the website spams you with messages that you need to upvote useful posts, the next thing you see is that it's telling you off because some unknown profile has received too many upvotes already. I therefore see no point in such a notification, as it would only condone the "rep-whoring" aspect of this site, and demotivate users to upvote useful content.

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  • I don't think that you would trigger the "serial upvoting" threshold when browsing posts by topic and upvoting answers that you've read. The trigger is tuned to catch people who browse-by-poster (e.g. through his profile) and (more or less) "blindly" upvoting everything.
    – Bergi
    Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 15:11
  • Another valid case is upvoting good questions that you have previously answered, but forgot to vote for at the time. I recently did that very thing on a wide variety of questions.
    – ssube
    Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 17:23
  • I believe the vote reversal script also removes the mark on those posts, thus not merely reversing the rep gain, but the indicator of helpfulness you're trying to preserve. Warning users that their attempts at helping others and rewarding those who help others are not doing what they expect is just good UX. This answer is founded on wrong assumptions. Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 22:55
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As TravisJ commented, I've probably been guilty of serial upvoting myself - I see an interesting answer, read the user's other questions/answers and think that they're just so good I vote on a few more to move up their content. This is especially likely in small tags where the other user has some expertise. I didn't realize that could actually hurt them or be construed as bad citizenship.

Some kind of warning would be helpful - if it said something like "You've already voted for this user (x) times today - further votes for them will not be applied."

Or, perhaps serial upvotes could move up content but not affect reputation - have a "reputation cap" of 20/day from a given user's votes (4q, 2a). This would prevent serial "gratitude" upvoting but retain the "usefulness" rating of posts.

4

No...

Most any indication of serial voting, either up or down, could be used to decipher part of the vote fraud algorithm.

Keep in mind that while you may be the target of serial voting from a fan, a lot of the time the vote fraud script is catching much more nefarious patterns of voting and we need it to be effective in doing that.

If we crack the door to instruct good faith users, we may end up opening a Pandora's box. Sock-puppets, and spammers, and trolls... Oh my...

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  • The data is already available for those targeted by serial voting. What more, precisely, do you need? Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 22:53
  • @NathanTuggy Not sure what you mean... I was trying to say that having a message pop-up telling users that they've tripped the serial voting script would give them a pretty good picture of how many votes in what time period would raise attention.
    – apaul
    Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 22:56
  • As my comment on the question suggested, while instant notifications may not be safe, notifying at the end of the day raises no new security problems. (Since those targeted are notified in their rep tabs.) Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 22:58
  • @NathanTuggy The question is suggesting that there should be instant notification. While waiting till the end of the day is perhaps a little better, it would only take a little trial and error to figure out where the lines are. Granted as things stand now a user could try to figure this out with a couple of sock-puppet accounts, but they would very likely get spotted by moderators before they could do too many trials...
    – apaul
    Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 23:05
  • And they would not be spotted by moderators if they attempted the same trials with the proposed time-delayed notifications? I don't understand why one is fundamentally different from the other, and I don't think there is any such difference. Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 23:06
2

Yes, we should notify serial up-voters.

I think this knowledge should be disseminated in an active way, such as you describe.

0

The script should notify the voter when their upvote series is reversed. (I.e., once a day.) It should probably also notify them on reversing a downvote series, too†.

Silently reversing the voting patterns of ordinary users is unpleasantly reminiscent of hellbanning, which SE has steadily moved away from. And if, as we've been reassured multiple times, serial voting is by no means a sure indicator of any sort of foul play, what's the harm of surfacing a little more data? It's not as though the current implementation hides the reversals (in either direction) from the targets.

There is therefore no new vulnerability presented by this change, and a substantial opportunity to tighten up user experience and educate new users in some non-obvious quirks of the platform.

†This is really the only exception; there's an asymmetry between ragevoters and their victims that exists in the current implementation that notifying of downvote reversal would remove. That's not ideal, but I think it's manageable, and in many cases it might even discourage as much serial downvoting as, or even more than, it incites repeated attempts to slip under the radar.

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