There’s also the interest in deterring everyone else from doing it (general deterrence), not just in getting these specific people to stop doing it (specific deterrence). While I have mixed feelings about publicly naming offenders, the penalty does need to sting enough to make the benefits of the offense not worth the risk of getting caught. A private warning with no real consequences might persuade the person violating the rules not to do it again, but double-voting would surge as people learned you get a freebie.
“double-voting would surge as people learned you get a freebie.”
I just don’t see this happening?
Separately, one objection I have to cracking down hard on self-voting is that I think this is not very harmful relative to other ways in which people don’t vote how they’re “supposed to.” E.g., we know the correlation between upvotes and agree votes is incredibly high, and downvoting something solely because you disagree with it strikes me as more harmful to discourse on the forum than self-voting. I think the reason self-voting gets highlighted isn’t because it’s especially harmful, it’s just because it’s especially catchable.
If the mods want to improve people’s voting behavior on the forum, I both wish they’d target different voting behavior (ie, the agree/upvoting correlation) and use different means to do it (ie, generating reports for people of their own voting correlations, whether they tend to upvote/downvote certain people, etc), rather than naming/shaming people for self-voting.
I think it’s more that upvoting your own posts from an alt is (1) willful, intentional behavior (2) aimed at deceiving the community about the level of support of a comment (3) for the person’s own benefit. Presumably, most people who are doing it are employing some sort of means to evade detection, which adds another layer of deceptiveness. While I don’t like downvoting-for-disagreement and the like either, that kind of behavior presumptively reflects a natural cognitive bias rather than any of the three characteristics listed above. It is for those reasons that—in my view—downvoting-for-disagreement is generally not the proper subject of a sanctioning system,[1] while self-upvoting is.
I’ve suggested to the mods before that sanctions should sometimes be more carefully tailored to the offense, so I’d be open to the view that consequences like permanently denying the violator’s ability to vote and their ability to use alts might be more tailored to the offense than public disclosure. Those are the specific functions which they have demonstrated an inability to handle responsibly. Neither function is so fundamental to the ability to use the Forum that the mods should feel obliged to expend their time deciding if the violator has rehabilitated themselves enough to restore those privileges.
There could be circumstances in which soft-norm violative behavior was so extreme that sanctions should be considered. However, unlike “don’t multi-vote” (which is a bright-line rule for which the violator should be perfectly aware that they are violating the rules), these norms are less clearcut—so privately reaching out to the person would be the appropriate first action in a case like that.
There’s also the interest in deterring everyone else from doing it (general deterrence), not just in getting these specific people to stop doing it (specific deterrence). While I have mixed feelings about publicly naming offenders, the penalty does need to sting enough to make the benefits of the offense not worth the risk of getting caught. A private warning with no real consequences might persuade the person violating the rules not to do it again, but double-voting would surge as people learned you get a freebie.
“double-voting would surge as people learned you get a freebie.”
I just don’t see this happening?
Separately, one objection I have to cracking down hard on self-voting is that I think this is not very harmful relative to other ways in which people don’t vote how they’re “supposed to.” E.g., we know the correlation between upvotes and agree votes is incredibly high, and downvoting something solely because you disagree with it strikes me as more harmful to discourse on the forum than self-voting. I think the reason self-voting gets highlighted isn’t because it’s especially harmful, it’s just because it’s especially catchable.
If the mods want to improve people’s voting behavior on the forum, I both wish they’d target different voting behavior (ie, the agree/upvoting correlation) and use different means to do it (ie, generating reports for people of their own voting correlations, whether they tend to upvote/downvote certain people, etc), rather than naming/shaming people for self-voting.
I think it’s more that upvoting your own posts from an alt is (1) willful, intentional behavior (2) aimed at deceiving the community about the level of support of a comment (3) for the person’s own benefit. Presumably, most people who are doing it are employing some sort of means to evade detection, which adds another layer of deceptiveness. While I don’t like downvoting-for-disagreement and the like either, that kind of behavior presumptively reflects a natural cognitive bias rather than any of the three characteristics listed above. It is for those reasons that—in my view—downvoting-for-disagreement is generally not the proper subject of a sanctioning system,[1] while self-upvoting is.
I’ve suggested to the mods before that sanctions should sometimes be more carefully tailored to the offense, so I’d be open to the view that consequences like permanently denying the violator’s ability to vote and their ability to use alts might be more tailored to the offense than public disclosure. Those are the specific functions which they have demonstrated an inability to handle responsibly. Neither function is so fundamental to the ability to use the Forum that the mods should feel obliged to expend their time deciding if the violator has rehabilitated themselves enough to restore those privileges.
There could be circumstances in which soft-norm violative behavior was so extreme that sanctions should be considered. However, unlike “don’t multi-vote” (which is a bright-line rule for which the violator should be perfectly aware that they are violating the rules), these norms are less clearcut—so privately reaching out to the person would be the appropriate first action in a case like that.