Magnitus: I think such a system can work well (look at Stackoverflow), but we are pretty far from that here.

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).

Ramor_: Plumb: Rather not to get too off topic. But I am not falling for much. :D

But yeah, I have been around EU and worked with homeless/etc.. people (directly). I know the practical systems and it's "separated" and made on purpose (in 'practically' useless way) and EU is for many years corrupted insanely but that would be a different topic. I have experiences from few countries on that topic, so it's EU-directed by some elites, probably. The problem is that they won't help to local homeless (and often block EU people going to work to another country so they end up homeless there, because they can't work - in spite of the law) but import "others" and give them flats/houses (per person) and pocket money even for cigarettes and they don't have to follow anything like to search for some work or follow something to get a help (like local homeless people have to), etc... (what is happening in US is happening here for ages). Main cities in EU became dangerous.
That is when I get annoyed when people are getting censored here on the forum while pointing out that GOG doesn't care about anything while we paying them for products to be just censored when they don't work and even GOG won't reply after we complain here and we end up getting censored by "weird users and moderators", while GOG/CDPR is also getting funded by EU to create stuff they are selling to us. While a bit of that money would save so much problems for (real and local) homeless people, for example.

cdprojekt.com/en/media/news/cd-projekt-group-secures-30-million-pln-gameinn-innovation-funds/ (includes GOG)
cdprojekt.com/en/capital-group/eu-projects/ (7-7.5 millions in euro for Cyberpunk by other sources for CDPR)

And then you get censored when you pointing out they are not even protecting your data or following the law.
GOG staff created tools so your downvoted posts are invisible to new users, etc...
I was waiting for months to even get a reply from support and they told me they will have to consult it with a lawyer and I waited another 2 weeks. No joke. A lawyer. That is how problematic they are. And that is why this forum is so censored, because lots of people feel the same way. That is why downvoting and the spinning of the public opinion on the forum.

This company is far gone to me.
And there is a "group of fanboys" that are still trying to portrait CD Projekt Red (and GOG) like some small indie pro-bono company, which annoys me the most. They are one of the biggest ones in the EU. If not the biggest one at times and very promoted and protected by EU/polish government. And those guys owning it became billionaries after selling broken taxmoney funded game while censoring annoyed people.

The censoring/downvoting is just a sign of a failing company to me that went itself all-out political.
The irony if is that if you point out them being political, they censor you for stating something "political". :D
Sometimes it's a reason why companies don't want people to talk politics at all, because they would point out what those companies do.

The fact that they ignored western culture and celebrate only chinese holidays now was quite the last straw for me... :D Very bold, I must admit.

BlueMooner: I don't know anything about coding or bots. If it's not that hard for average joes to make bots to downvote everyone in a thread, can't people counter that by making bots to UPvote everyone in threads? Wouldn't that be a far more effective counter than foolishly thinking gog will EVER change anything in this forum?

Waifu4Life: Upvoting and downvoting should just be removed from forums, stop trying to be Reddit!

Plumb: now this is an interesting idea

§pec†re: People could easily up vote the thread starter if they wanted but then there are the claims it is some gog staff doing it.
There are also groups that aren't part of the community that go around forums trying to censor topics or disrupt them.
Some are criminal or some are political.

Enebias: you are limited to 5 (or was it 7?) amount of positive rep per day, but the negative one is unlimited, afaik. So no, it wouldn't work.

BlueMooner: Is that 5 total, or a net gain of 5? If someone gave you -55, could you get +60 to counter?

And ultimately what does it matter? IF people don't like the bots attacking threads AND we all know gog won't do anything, THEN the only solution I see is to make upvote bots. It doesn't matter how much gain one is capped at per day... there is no other solution, right?

So... make upvoting bots, or accept the rep loss.

marcob: Is it a trend? I find myself losing all my reputation points everytime I reply to some politically correct/politically active user/topic that I don't agree with some very bold stances about controversial topics. Are they spammers? Hackers?
Are the admin officially reducing the rep. of users for unwanted opinions?