Wiping votes on deletion of highly active accounts (-865 points on "User was removed")

Question

Update: As MadScientist quite aptly pointed out this is also highly relevant:

• Don't throw away all votes when a user is deleted at +523 votes, feature-request

I was greeted by this screen just an hour ago:

After a little bit of digging and conjecturing, I worked out that the user removed was user llonesmiz.

I dearly bemoan the loss of a great SO contributor, and my (near) lone companion in [boost-spirit]. I know they had personal reasons for deleting their account, as I have tried to help/talk to them in comments over the last few months.

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Now, I'll be honest. I don't like losing the reputation.

On a more principled level I'm trying to work out the following questions:

• Is it fair/desirable that a user takes with them all the votes they had cast on account deletion?

  In my view, this was a highly respected power user with a lot of reputation in the [c++] domain. Their votes matter to me. Frequently, they taught me much better ways to do stuff, so I think it is a distinct disservice to the community to wipe their votes.

• Should high reputation accounts be deleted instead of being destroyed?

  • see also this answer for “delete” vs. “destroy”

  I'm not sure if according to ^that^ explanation the account should have been destroyed. If it was, maybe the criterion should be tuned a bit more.

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P.S. On my search across meta before posting this question I found the following things to be relevant:

• the above linked-to answer: What EXACTLY happens when I ask to delete my account?
• Do we lose rep for an accepted answer if the OP account is deleted?
• What EXACTLY happens when I ask to delete my account?

Answer 1

This was our screw-up, and preventing large impact deletes like this will be an addition to the code on our side sometime this week.

For now I've gone through the database and manually undone the delete action on this user's votes, which is the net impact that should have happened if they were moved to the community user...our normal process.

Your rep history (and about 1,300 other users) will no longer reflect this user's deletion.

Answer 2

As far as I can tell, this is not how deletion of such user accounts is supposed to happen.

The procedure has been outlined by SE developer in an answer to similar question as follows:

When we delete highly active users upon their request (i.e. they no longer wish to participate in Stack Exchange), we preserve their up/down/accepted votes by moving them to our Community User.

Unless I miss something, loss of 865 points and 2000+ votes suggest that user qualifies as "highly active".

The fact that votes weren't preserved indicates either a bug like one that has been confirmed at above post ("bug in our vote auto-invalidation task"), or, maybe, that removal somehow (how?) did not happen "upon their request".

Answer 3

In my view, this was a highly respected power user with a lot of reputation in the c++ domain. His votes matter to me. Frequently, he taught me much better ways to do stuff, so, if this user cast a vote, I think it is a distinct disservice to the community to wipe his votes.

Voting is, more or less, anonymous. Yes, you can kinda figure out who voted on what, if you really investigate or poll the database directly. But you can't tell just from looking at a question or answer who voted for it. So I don't see how wiping his votes impacts how someone looks at a question/answer he voted on.

Furthermore, the account is deleted. "The community" no longer knows he existed. He has been unpersoned. Nobody in the community can find him or his contributions, let alone his votes.

So I don't see how the community is dis-served here.

Is it fair/desirable that a user takes with him all the votes he had cast on account deletion?

Personally, I don't think that account deletion should be allowed, period. However, if they're going to allow it then yes, they should be completely unpersoned. With the exception of the text they wrote (the primary contribution of a user), the site should be as though they never were here.

And they shouldn't be allowed to have their old accounts, no matter how much they beg.

The reason for this is simple: to discourage people from deleting their accounts. If deletion were painless and/or easily reversible, then people would be doing it more often. Deletion has negative effects. You can't easily find other questions/answers from a user who posted a good question/answer you liked. You can't track a deleted account. And so forth. Even if votes aren't removed, deletion damages Stack Overflow.

So we make deletion hurt. That way, it only gets used in the most critical of circumstances.