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Re^4: Can I please have multiple downvotes per (certain monk's) posts.

by aaron_baugher (Curate)
on May 30, 2015 at 11:18 UTC ( [id://1128390]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re^3: Can I please have multiple downvotes per (certain monk's) posts.
in thread Can I please have multiple downvotes per (certain monk's) posts.

The question is: what can a society do when a member is being insistently disruptive but is intelligent and disciplined enough to do it within the rules of the society? What can you do when someone keeps violating the spirit of the law without breaking the letter of it?

It's a rare problem, because the kind of person who would do this is rarely disciplined enough to stay within the rules for long. Most trolls run roughshod over the rules and are easily dispatched by enforcing them. But the careful disruptor can't be dealt with by the rules (such as the consideration system) because he's able to stay just within them.

In a society with an absolute ruler, such as a one-owner blog, the solution is easy: the ruler invokes his executive authority and says, "The rules aren't equipped to handle this situation, so I'm making a judgment call, and you're gone." A group can do the same thing with a vote, but there doesn't seem to be much sentiment for that sort of thing here (and anonymous posting may make enforcement of such a decision impossible).

If ejecting a troublemaker of this sort is impossible (or undesirable), then the question becomes: if we can't exile him or restrict his posting, can we at least reduce the harm caused by his posts? And can this be automated so that it doesn't require a meeting of the minds every time? To protect newbies and those searching the web for solutions from his bad ideas (and bad posts in general), posts with negative reputation might not be shown to non-logged-in users. They could be replaced with a warning, as someone suggested, so that a thread doesn't become nonsensical with the other person seeming to be talking to himself.

The same functionality could be applied for new members below a certain level -- perhaps with the ability to turn off this filtering in one's preferences, similar to what we can do with deep-nested replies. So seeing "dangerous" posts would be something you'd have to switch on after you presumably knew enough not to be fooled by them.

That wouldn't save regular members the irritation and time-wasting of having to read and down-vote his posts over and over, but it would reduce the harm he's able to do to the overall reputation and value of the site, which may be as much as there is the will to do.

Aaron B.
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