Serial voting simply because of disagreement of opinions is toxic in the main site. While deduction of a few points does not (maybe it does) matter a lot for the victim, in the long run, however, it significantly misleads future readers of the site:
- it mistakenly signals that a post is problematic while it is really not.
- for some advanced questions that are not viewed by many users (and thus not many votes), it attempted to make a broken window.
Here is an example of a user who posted a question on meta recently and was attacked by serial voting:
Two old well-written relatively advanced questions that have very few views (148 and 86 respectively) today were downvoted within an hour:
- Notations in Functional Analysis: $L^p$, $L_p$, $\mathscr{L}^p$, $\mathscr{L}_p$, $\mathcal{L}^p$, and $\mathcal{L}_p$
- Dimension of a Subspace of $\text{Hom}_\mathbb{K}(\mathcal{V},\mathcal{W})$ Consisting of Only Linear Transformations of Rank $\leq r$
This situation is highly impossible to be random. However, such a number of "smart" votes cannot be detected by the system serial voting detector since technically it has yet to be "serial".
Can we have a smarter detector?