up vote 3 down vote favorite

I've read that one doesn't need to do anything about suspected serial downvoting, because it's taken care of automatically by an algorithm.

What if one suspects that someone is aware of that algorithm and is trying to evade its notice by downvoting one or two posts a day instead of a large number all at once?

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  • 3
    I suspect it would have been best for you to flag for moderators attention any questionable questions/answers that were downvoted recently. (Actually, I should have said you should flag the most recently downvoted, and include a link to your reputation in your profile (activity/reputation). I recently faced a similar situation. Sometimes it can alert the mods to something smelly, and occasionally it can lead to action, when one is facing daily downvotes or double downvotes. – amWhy Aug 21 at 19:22
  • This is a sad subject, I think that if some user wants to expose another to this, he can do it currently. – user243301 Aug 21 at 19:46
  • While it isn't pleasant, two downvotes a day really has little to no effect on the overall reputation of a user with a nontrivial rep - the ongoing returns from votes on old questions, even if no new answers are posted, will usually lead to a rep increase over time, and the tiny penalty for a downvote will usually not overcome the overall rep increase. – Carl Mummert Aug 23 at 1:36
  • Related: similar old post and a feature request. – user1729 Aug 23 at 10:35
up vote 8 down vote accepted

It is best to bring this up via a flag 'other.' Flag one of the affected posts and describe the situation briefly; to flag one post suffices, we can see which other posts were downvoted then. (I see this was just said in a comment, too; so I confirm this.)

However, moderators do not know the origin of individual votes either. But, we can access reports about voting that do allow to identify such behavior sometimes. If the voting seems abusive, we do take action.

In passing, this is also addressed in the general post on this subject: When are serial downvotes classified as anomalous? What to do about a sequence of downvotes?

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  • I second that you are saying, but I believe that is required improve the tools to detect malicious downvoting. For anyone, a top user or a new user, a top mathematician or a mathematician that has an anonymous account, addition to reputation matters how he/she feels in front of a situation that does not understand. I remember a case in the past of an user who said to be teacher wanted deleted his account after he was downvoted. – user243301 Aug 22 at 12:30
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    While I agree that it would be better if we could detect more of the "bad" voting, I think it is also important to remind oneself that the main point of the "bad" voting is, to provoke and to annoy. Thus, a good counter measure is not to get annoyed. :-) – quid♦ Aug 22 at 13:47

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