Is a claim like this something the moderators would have the ability to actually verify? If so, would a public claim like this be something the moderators would be interested in verifying? I similarly dislike the allegation as written and I think if this was verified in some way it would be useful regardless of the outcome
When we (the moderation team) have a good reason to believe that norm-breaking behavior is going on, we can access information including which accounts voted, and how, on any given post or comment (we’d need to work with the developers on this; this information isn’t readily available to us). To protect users’ privacy, we check whether something is weird before we look at IDs by looking at things like the timing and weight of votes without looking at who voted.
But we don’t investigate without good reason, both because we don’t have capacity for it, and because we want to give users privacy. So we’d need a reason to investigate, which is where reports like this come in.
Sample good reasons:
“A bunch of my comments from past months were all downvoted in the last day or two, can you see if someone was mass-downvoting?”
“I heard USERNAME say they paid people to upvote them on MTurk, can you see if a bunch of new users just joined to vote on their posts?”
Sample bad reason:
“I think USERNAME is manipulating karma, can you investigate them?”
(You can also make the claims privately by directly getting in touch, which can be better than speculating publicly.)
Is a claim like this something the moderators would have the ability to actually verify? If so, would a public claim like this be something the moderators would be interested in verifying? I similarly dislike the allegation as written and I think if this was verified in some way it would be useful regardless of the outcome
Depends on the claim.
When we (the moderation team) have a good reason to believe that norm-breaking behavior is going on, we can access information including which accounts voted, and how, on any given post or comment (we’d need to work with the developers on this; this information isn’t readily available to us). To protect users’ privacy, we check whether something is weird before we look at IDs by looking at things like the timing and weight of votes without looking at who voted.
But we don’t investigate without good reason, both because we don’t have capacity for it, and because we want to give users privacy. So we’d need a reason to investigate, which is where reports like this come in.
Sample good reasons:
“A bunch of my comments from past months were all downvoted in the last day or two, can you see if someone was mass-downvoting?”
“I heard USERNAME say they paid people to upvote them on MTurk, can you see if a bunch of new users just joined to vote on their posts?”
Sample bad reason:
“I think USERNAME is manipulating karma, can you investigate them?”
(You can also make the claims privately by directly getting in touch, which can be better than speculating publicly.)