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
