Being serious for a moment, this is probably not a bad idea, although I remain unconvinced that it's a good idea either. Reinforcing good behaviour is not equivalent to punishing bad behaviour. I'm not sure we want to go that route.

Well alright then, I can't speak for anyone else, I'm not sure I want to go that route. So that's a basically undecidced but more not in favour than in favour.

Nuance

However I would be for it if that issue could be alleviated. One suggestion that I saw and liked is that you cannot downvote a person that you downvoted within your last few votes for some sensible definition of few. (Say, 5.) That would mean that despite downvotes having more of an effect, it would be harder to target a person.

In short my position is that most people are adverse to downvoting others (I know I am) and a downvote is a stronger statement than an upvote. But you have to make sure that a small minority of real jerks don't get more control because of the change.

BTW anyone who downvotes me on this post, please /tell me about it. You undoubtably know what I ask on my home node, why not take advantage of it?

I think that the main change would be to make it easier for a small group of people to try to vote people they don't like out of existence. Does PM really need that to be any easier than it is already?

Excuse me? How do you figure?

Suppose this Evil Conspiracy were to decide to "vote you out of existence". Two of them maliciously vote down an otherwise good post. The third fires his -- from across the grassy knoll. Oh no! Down three --!

Meanwhile, 5 people have voted it up. (This is supposed to be a good post, right?)

In other words, this doesn't make it any easier for a small group of users to vote anything out of existence. It still takes a clear majority of voters voting against you to make any difference. All this does is make the penalty for receiving -- as large as the reward for ++ votes. How is that in any way, shape, or form unfair?

As for the "downvote limit" -- WTF?? Uh-uh. Completely unreasonable. When you vote in an election for state and city initiatives, do you have a limit on how many you can vote "no" on? No! The limit on downvoting is ridiculous. No "shadow conspiracy" can make that big of a dent in your XP unless the conspiracy had a large number of members - and if that many people are upset, then I think there's another problem.

- email Ozymandias

I don't mean that they would be able to vote my posts out of existence. I mean they would be able to vote my XP out of existence.

If the proposed change was made, one person downvoting someone has the same effect on experience as 2 people upvoting. That means that it takes the concentrated effort of fewer people to try to strip a monk of all XP.

The second change that I saw proposed (I did not come up with it, I saw it flow from, as I recall, tye in the chatterbox) would make it very hard to say, I think so-and-so is a bozo, I am going to take down their experience. I assume that that is what happened to me when I see several posts in a row get -- inside of a few minutes That looks like one person deciding to take me down a notch.

Were it, in fact, me writing an abysmal post then you would expect to see that one post get multiple -- votes in a row. With the exception of the controversial one that you just responded to, I have not seen that happen.

Incidentally I have seen myself put up what I thought was a good post, seen it immediately hit -1, and then watched it start climbing. That really looks like a person with a motive and not something wrong with the post per se.

That was part of the original discussion, anyway...

Here is some perl-golf code to show what I believe to be the intended functionality:

# These are the values computed elsewhere.  Change as desired to test.
+..
$REP  = -12;
$NORM = 6;
$Vote = 1; # 1 for ++, 0 for --
$XP = 0;
####

$XPChange = $Vote || -1;

%Odds =
  (0         => [ .33,  .33],
   $NORM     => [ .33,  .50],
   $NORM * 2 => [ .33,  .66],
   $NORM * 3 => [ .25,  .75],
   $NORM * 4 => [0.00, 1.00]);

$XP += $XPChange
  if rand() <= $Odds{(sort {$a <=> $b} grep {abs($REP) >= $_}
                      keys %Odds)[-1]} -> [$REP >= 0 ? $Vote : !$Vote]
+;

print $XP;
[download]

Russ
Brainbench 'Most Valuable Professional' for Perl

Oops, typo:

I've been looking at the voting scale, and I think it should do the same for negative votes.

Should be:

I've been looking at the voting scale, and I think it should do the same for negative reps.

J. J. Horner
Linux, Perl, Apache, Stronghold, Unix
jhorner@knoxlug.org http://www.knoxlug.org/