Hi Askville community,
We
wanted to address a discussion board comment we made today on voting abuse. Voting abuse is a serious offense on Askville. Many of our users spends significant amount of time researching and
providing very thoughtful answers. And voting is a core part of how we recognize and reward those Askville users for the great answers they submit.
That said, we want to explain what constitutes voting abuse so that it is clear for everyone, new and old:
A
- When an answerer is voting on other people's answers with the sole
intention of lowering other people's final ratings (e.g. give every
answerer a 1-star/bad rating) so that their answer has a higher chance
of getting the best answer ribbon.
B - when someone is playing
"favorites" or "negatives" (i.e. negatively vote on someone they don't
like) and/or colluding with others by regularly voting favorably toward
specific users, regardless of whether those answers were of high
quality.
C - For both A & B, especially B, we want to see
a trend occur versus an isolated incident. Reason being, is that it is
difficult to prove that you are colluding or playing favorites when
you've only voted on 1 question.
So what should you do if you think there was voting abuse on a specific question? Submit a voting abuse report! We read every report abuse form submitted and will investigate each one (albeit, we may not be able to get to it in a timely manner due to the size of our team and volume of report abuse forms we receive each day).
What you should *not* do, is to make public accusations directly at other members
of the community (even if you're right) on the discussion board. Our philosophy, rightly
or wrongly, is to give people the benefit of doubt and let the
evidence/investigation determine if there were any violations. By
publicly jumping to conclusions and making accusations first, before
the evidence and investigation is completed, is analogous to "shoot
first, and then ask questions later", which we feel is not fair.
Now there are several comments we'd like to raise and some caveats to the above violations:
1
- if you receive a negative vote (less than 3 stars), you should not
always assume it is the fault of the asker, especially when you have
multiple answers to a question. Every answerer has the option to vote
too.
2 - Just because you received a 3 star rating (Average)
does not always mean that no one voted. In most cases, users have voted
and your rating has averaged out to 3 stars.
3 - Opinion based
questions are very subjective by definition. When you answer an opinion
based question, you need to realize that your opinion may not be
popular, which could result in a negative vote. That said, please use
the discussion board to *respectfully* discuss/voice your opinion and
hopefully you can sway other voters to your side! Moreover, you can
always appeal any rating, if you feel that your opinion/answer didn't
get fair representation from the group of initial voters. To be clear,
if this has happened to you, this is *not* voting abuse. If someone
answered the question, "What is a funny joke?" and received a 1-star
rating, is it voting abuse? Opinions, by definition, are subjective.
What you may consider a 5-star (Great) answer, others may consider that
answer just 3-star (Average) or 1-star (Bad). As a result, we have
always taken the stance that it is very difficult to prove that voting
abuse occured on any opinion based question.
4 - Not everyone
you meet within Askville will share the same beliefs as you, which we
believe is a good thing. When you interact with other Askvillers who
have different views than you, it's very important that you respect
their views and philosophies. It's perfectly okay to disagree so long
as you do it in a respectful manner, as the old saying goes,
"intelligent people can agree to disagree". However, if you publicly
chastise, harass, or disrespect other users who have a different
viewpoint, that is not tolerated and is a clear violation of our
community guidelines. So please be nice to your neighbors and treat
others as you would want them to treat you. As mentioned previously,
publicly accusing others of voting abuse is against community
guidelines since it is a form of public harrassment. Before you think
about publicly accusing someone of voting abuse, please ask yourself
the question, "how would you feel if someone publicly accused you of
voting abuse?". Instead of publicly making an accusation against a
specific Askville user, just use the report abuse form and we will
investigate.
5 - Favoritism or other forms of voting
manipulation to game the voting process is a direct violation of our
community guidelines. That said, not everyone is fully aware of how one
should behave and/or vote in Askville, especially newbies. Everyone
makes honest mistakes and what you may think is malicious intent may be
just an honest error of judgment, or someone who does not understand
the rules. We strongly encourage our veteran Askvillers to lead by
example and warmly welcome newbie users and respectfully advise others
about how to use the site via private messaging.
We know this system isn't
perfect (is any voting system perfect?). However, we hope you respect
these rules/guidelines as you participate in this community. As always,
we are open to suggestions (and we've seen several that recently were
posted that we like!), and will think about how we can make
improvements to this system in the future.
Sincerely,
-The Askville Team
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