According to Shog9's post, there are two and only two reasons why votes are removed when an account is deleted:
- Some thresholds relating to vote count and number of people affected are not breached.
- The aforementioned thresholds are breached, but the account has exhibited fraudulent activity at some point in its history.
It's easy to say differentiating these 2 reasons is unimportant. But some users experience arbitrary black-box shocks to their reputation, while others just see "more comfortable" 50-200 reputation losses.
Often it's observable in a popular tag a whole bunch of users who frequent that tag see a correlated loss, presumably because the deleted user was active in that tag.
So my question is: while it's important not to publicize the thresholds, wouldn't it make sense to differentiate between the 2 reasons above in reputation history? In other words, improve the messages to:
- User has been removed: thresholds not breached
- User has been removed: fraudulent activity
The benefits are:
- Some broad user-based oversight that mods aren't fat-fingering their deletions. If we see dozens of users in a tag losing 100-200 rep on the same days on a regular basis due to "thresholds not breached", something's gone wrong.
- Greater confidence in the process. Right now, it's a black box mechanism, usually a negative shock to users' reputation.