Deviant vote alarm

Question

Since we've been having a big discussion about so-called "excessive voting" and I figured I would weigh in with a more robust idea that accomplishes the same goal, better and without the need to artificially hinder users who just happen to stumble upon a lot of bad posts: the deviant vote alarm.

Here's my idea: instead of going by absolute, arbitrary ratios, we look at votes on a weighted case-by-case manner: every vote that goes against the grain is a "deviant" vote. The more similar votes a post has, the more "deviance" the counter vote has.

In other words, if a post has ten upvotes, a downvote is deviant. Likewise, if a post has five downvotes, pity upvotes are deviant. The downvote is considered more deviant because it is more against an established norm. Votes for or against mid-ground posts cannot be considered deviant. Deviance is accumulated by users, and dissipates over time. Deviance in an of itself is not a bad thing; rather it's just a measurement of how often a user votes opposite of everyone else. There should be no automated restrictions on actions that create more deviance.

This way, both pity upvotes (against negative-voted posts) and malicious downvotes (against positive-voted posts) are captured and weighed using the same mechanism. Once a user has achieved a certain threshold of vote deviance, he is automatically flagged for a moderator to look into him (the deviant vote alarm). The moderator then uses his discretion to determine if the user is malicious or had legitimate reason for casting so many deviant votes. Singular deviant votes are not enough to trigger the alarm - thresholds need to be set so that false positives aren't commonplace.

Answer 1

Take this C++ question:

How can I write a macro that checks if the "this" pointer is null, that gets called in all my code?

And say 10, or 100 people respond with quite plausible solutions.

And then someone who knows what he is talking about says that if you are in a state where your implementation's this pointer is null, you are deep in undefined behaviour land, so it is pointless (meaningless in terms of the C++ Standard) to test for. And that person downvotes some of the most plausible answers (as in fact they are all wrong).

Is this person being deviant?

And this is not theoretical - this happens all the time on the C++ tags.

Answer 2

The next natural step from there is a Lemming Alarm for people who always vote in lock-step with the herd.

All things in moderation, including conformity. ;)

Answer 3

I upvoted this, because I think it takes an interesting perspective. This reminds me of controversial-patterns, but instead the controversy is a property of the vote itself. A single down vote on a post that has 3 times its weight in up votes appears to be controversial, or as you put it "deviant."

I think the idea could benefit from some discussion, but I like the direction and I think it would address much of the malicious voting patterns that take place on Stack Overflow. I often times do see posts with +5 or +10, and a single -1.