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When you say "handles this", do you mean normalizing behavior of your main user base or to prevent bots from spamming the system?

"Trigger discipline" sounds like you essentially can't trust the average goat not to abuse their privileges and thus use the ratio to keep them in their sandbox. In other words, you are going beyond spamming and trying to normalize behavior.

Ok, fine. What is your main reason(s) for the ratio? Let's examine it's properties.

- Does it prevent someone from dumping on a user or sub? No. You can always just upvote some random shit so you can downvote some unrelated shit later. The exception being if they were to simply run out of content to upvote because there's a window of time which you can no longer upvote something I believe, right (two weeks)? Given the size of this site I think that's more than enough content for users to balance themselves out but I didn't do the math on that.

- Does it prevent infinite voting? No. You can still upvote infinitely because the ratio is a upper bound on downvotes and a lowerbound on upvotes. Is there a vote limit per day or something too? If so that in of itself seems sufficient to prevent a bot infinitely spamming votes (up or down).

- Does it prevent a new troll account from shitting up upgoat with downvotes? Well, unless I'm missing something, no. They can just upvote as much as the ratio requires first. They can even have other bots create content just so they deposit an upvote on it and cash it out on some target later. If they are patient the bots can simply upvote shit for weeks and then pull the trigger with downgoats at the right moment.

- Does it bias content to favor upvotes over downvotes? By design. But again, why is this a good thing, besides preventing bot manipulation?

Besides bots, I guess ultimately I still don't know what you're really trying to mitigate.
Is it downvoting a particular user or sub out of spite? Legitimately want to know what the meat of the problem is.

- mage

Got it.

Hm.

You might have an unintended consequence of people stopping trying to "fix" the site.

I use "fix" for lack of a better word, because users imagine their vote is making a correction.


A downvote feels like we're cleaning up in a self-correcting system that, otherwise, tends to reward the most insessant serial posters of [low quality whatever].

In other words. If the intention is to stay positive and upkeep a clean home then that may work. But if a bunch of hoarders move into a cluttered household this might accidentally be the feature that hides the sponge and the broom and the vacuum; aka empowers those that have the worst impact.