If someone’s goal is to mass-downvote all comments made by someone else, this wouldn’t stop them at all. Just keep the page open in another tab, and every N minutes downvote the next comment.
For people who read quickly and vote in real time, it would be inconvenient. (For example, Stack Exchange has a similar thing: I can read a short comment in 1 second, but I am allowed to vote only once per 5 seconds. So I read 20 comments in a row and then close the page without voting, because I don’t see a point in waiting.)
Given that the aim is to prevent mass downvoting of a single person, it could perhaps be more usefully implemented as a timer that prevents one person from downvoting the same user more than X times every N minutes (for some low X, perhaps only one or two).
This would have less effect on the casual browser (since, normally, you’d be reading comments from several people) while still making it harder for the mass downvoter.
There may need to be some changes to the database to implement this, of course.
A person can make five stupid comments in the same thread, in which case they would deserve five consecutive downvotes. (Making ten or more stupid comments in the same thread seems unlikely. Unless it’s a troll, in which case their karma will become negative either way.)
By the way, I don’t remember seeing five stupid comments by the same person recently, but it seems to me that a year or two ago it was relatively common, e.g. in political threads, where people kept replying to each other and refused to give up.
If someone’s goal is to mass-downvote all comments made by someone else, this wouldn’t stop them at all. Just keep the page open in another tab, and every N minutes downvote the next comment.
For people who read quickly and vote in real time, it would be inconvenient. (For example, Stack Exchange has a similar thing: I can read a short comment in 1 second, but I am allowed to vote only once per 5 seconds. So I read 20 comments in a row and then close the page without voting, because I don’t see a point in waiting.)
Given that the aim is to prevent mass downvoting of a single person, it could perhaps be more usefully implemented as a timer that prevents one person from downvoting the same user more than X times every N minutes (for some low X, perhaps only one or two).
This would have less effect on the casual browser (since, normally, you’d be reading comments from several people) while still making it harder for the mass downvoter.
There may need to be some changes to the database to implement this, of course.
A person can make five stupid comments in the same thread, in which case they would deserve five consecutive downvotes. (Making ten or more stupid comments in the same thread seems unlikely. Unless it’s a troll, in which case their karma will become negative either way.)
By the way, I don’t remember seeing five stupid comments by the same person recently, but it seems to me that a year or two ago it was relatively common, e.g. in political threads, where people kept replying to each other and refused to give up.
X=5 N=120, perhaps?
That allows up to five stupid comments from the same poster to be downvoted in rapid succession, but makes it a lot harder for the mass downvoter.