Posted February 07, 2022
low rated
marcob: It was clearly meant to exclude badly behaving users and it makes much sense if used like this (it's still censure, but it's the original and functional role of censure as it was intended, the other being a warped, one-side, "cheating" form of it). I just find it sad that it's used primarily in this distorted way, because still someone would come to wrong conclusions if he takes this system as a genuine form of community self-regulation. And, moreso, it could still be such self-regulation and improve the forum instead of creating attrition. If only it were widely used as it should be.
Magnitus: I think such a system can work well (look at Stackoverflow), but we are pretty far from that here. marcob: The problem is "us all", apparently. Do you think, say, ten years ago, the web was more well-behaving and rule-abiding (not necessarily law-abiding, since it's common knowledge that piracy was more rampant in the past)? It seems a recent issue, or something that has grown to alarming proportions only in the last X years. Of course some low-level "parties" or "activists" can take advantage of this (while degrading their legitimate cause, btw) as any other kind of troll propaganda can do with any system-wide issue. But the problem came earlier than these kind of one-sided users. They only use these loopholes as a tool
Magnitus: The exact cause or the prevalence of such behaviour is hard to say (an academic researching the phenomenon might have some insight to shed, but I do not). I recall a comic at some point mentioning that as the net becomes more and more accessible, many low achieving anti-social types who previously didn't have a vector to voice their outlying opinions now have an easy to use (and in many cases, anonymous) platforms to do so.
It made a certain kind of sense, but without empirical data to back it up, its just an educated guess by a comedian.
Keeping our particular situation in mind, I think that if it is indeed someone operating a bot that downvotes people (and I suspect it is a contributing factor, though not beyond any doubt), that would take a minimal degree of computer literacy (not much, but a little) to operate so that person might still have been around 10-20 years ago to do what they are doing right now.
Otherwise, if you are talking about a technically proficient disruptors (which still might not apply to someone operating a bot downvoting people unless they also wrote the code for it), which is somewhat closer to my area of expertise, I think there is a greater proliferation of it now than 10 and certainly 20 years ago, because there are more people doing more valuable things online so the incentive is greater for would-be attackers (be they script kiddies, criminal hackers or state-sponsored hackers).
Post edited February 07, 2022 by marcob