I suggest a simple change: for any logged-in user’s own comments, display the name(s) of the people who downvoted him. I suspect that would fix the problem.
This would prevent mass downvoting, but at the cost of making votes socially significant. That’s a bigger deal than it sounds like; it means that you can schmooze people by downvoting their enemies’ comments (or by upvoting their own, if you extend it to that), and that you can incur the wrath of influential users if you dare to downvote theirs.
If you think there’s too much politics in voting patterns here already, I guarantee this will make it ten times worse. About the best thing that could happen is people converging on a Facebook-style upvote-only pattern (maybe with exceptions for obvious trolls), and I still view that as distinctly inferior to Reddit’s format for the purpose of promoting quality discussion.
How about the alternative of showing the name if greater than X percent of the user’s last Y comments have been voted down by the same person? If you downvote 98 of a user’s last 100 comments and they’re not a blatant troll, you probably deserve to earn their wrath, influential or not.
If you don’t want to do even that, then how about this instead: for each comment that was modded down, have a button to click for “moderation statistics”. If you click on the button it will say something like “This comment was modded down by 2 users. User 1 has modded down 4 of your past 100 posts. User 2 has modded down 99 of your past 100 posts”. Suspicious numbers like 99 out of 100 can be grounds for contacting an admin. There’s nothing like having an actual human being doing actual adminning. This solution would also prevent someone from gaming the system by noticing that a name is displayed at 95% so he only mods down 94% of someone’s posts.
At that point you might as well just write moderation tools for it, without requiring the user input step. Which wouldn’t be a bad idea in theory, but it runs into the usual LW bottleneck of development time.
All that’s actually needed in my case is an active admin that I can tell “this is an extremely suspicious pattern; please check it out”. Having a button to display moderation statistics is just a way to make it harder for the admin to rationalize away not doing any adminning (or looking at it from the other side, for the user to be able to prove to the admin that the problem is worth taking the time to look into).
This would prevent mass downvoting, but at the cost of making votes socially significant. That’s a bigger deal than it sounds like; it means that you can schmooze people by downvoting their enemies’ comments (or by upvoting their own, if you extend it to that), and that you can incur the wrath of influential users if you dare to downvote theirs.
If you think there’s too much politics in voting patterns here already, I guarantee this will make it ten times worse. About the best thing that could happen is people converging on a Facebook-style upvote-only pattern (maybe with exceptions for obvious trolls), and I still view that as distinctly inferior to Reddit’s format for the purpose of promoting quality discussion.
How about the alternative of showing the name if greater than X percent of the user’s last Y comments have been voted down by the same person? If you downvote 98 of a user’s last 100 comments and they’re not a blatant troll, you probably deserve to earn their wrath, influential or not.
If you don’t want to do even that, then how about this instead: for each comment that was modded down, have a button to click for “moderation statistics”. If you click on the button it will say something like “This comment was modded down by 2 users. User 1 has modded down 4 of your past 100 posts. User 2 has modded down 99 of your past 100 posts”. Suspicious numbers like 99 out of 100 can be grounds for contacting an admin. There’s nothing like having an actual human being doing actual adminning. This solution would also prevent someone from gaming the system by noticing that a name is displayed at 95% so he only mods down 94% of someone’s posts.
At that point you might as well just write moderation tools for it, without requiring the user input step. Which wouldn’t be a bad idea in theory, but it runs into the usual LW bottleneck of development time.
All that’s actually needed in my case is an active admin that I can tell “this is an extremely suspicious pattern; please check it out”. Having a button to display moderation statistics is just a way to make it harder for the admin to rationalize away not doing any adminning (or looking at it from the other side, for the user to be able to prove to the admin that the problem is worth taking the time to look into).