Nicely discouraging serial upvoting

Question

Probably everybody who is very active on SO has experienced cases of random, serial upvoting as the expression of thanks from a (usually newbie) user. The pattern is usually 5 or more upvotes on your latest answers.

The upvotes will be detected within 24 hours, and removed. (Or so I assume.) No harm done except maybe a minor irritation for people after one of the "rep cap" badges because they are shown a higher reputation than they actually have.

Still, I was thinking whether, in an attempt to channel the positive attitude into more productive areas, it would be worth showing a tooltip on the third upvote for the same person within time frame x:

Please use one upvote, a comment, or some quality content of your own, to say thank you

Large numbers of upvotes for the same user may become invalid as part of our spam detection mechanisms.

Does this make sense? Maybe it is too localized and rare, but it has happened to me three or four times in the last two weeks alone. You decide.

Clarification: I am not advocating putting up any kind of barrier on upvotes. The barrier is already there. I'm suggesting informing people of the barrier and the futility of their ten or so upvotes for a single person because those votes are likely to be revoked.

Update: @devinb makes the good point that "saying thanks" is not the only possible reason for serial upvoting, and the message wouldn't make sense then. The point still stands: Your votes aren't going to count, and when it comes to up voting (which is always some sort of positive behaviour, however misguided if done indiscriminately) I think it's fair to inform people of this.

Answer 1

This is basically training people to a) avoid upvoting or b) avoid detection by the vote fraud algorithms.

What good could come of it?

Answer 2

This one is a difficult problem, because it isn't necessarily an expression of thanks. If you look at Marc Gravell's profile page, and look at ANY of his answers, chances are you are going to want to upvote it. Which means, if I land on his profile page and then only click the question titles I think are interesting, I'm going to end up "serially upvoting" him.

For that reason, the message you describe is ridiculous. We are assuming intention and purpose behind a 'pattern' we have discovered. Another valid situation is that if Jon Skeet answers the first three C# questions in the "recent questions" list, and I look at all of them, chances are, I'm going to want to up vote his answers, because they'll be solid. And then a message pops up that says I shouldn't be upvoting anymore, even though I may not realize that I've upvoted the same person three times.

Further, if the last part of the message (the functional part) is only displayed whenever you have crossed the threshold, then you have indicated to any spammers what the threshold is.

I feel that any way this is implemented would lead to many mis-fires, confusion, and ultimately very little benefit.

Answer 3

Isn't it possible that someone started reading through a user's answers and thought - that's a good answer, hey that one's really interesting, gosh, I didn't know that, and voted accordingly? This seems like perfectly reasonable and correct (for SO) behaviour to me.

Answer 4

I never experienced this issue myself, but I can imagine it happening. Your proposal is reasonable, well worded and easy to understand even for new users, so I suggest implementing it.

I would make a small adjustment to the message: "You have upvoted the same person many times [...]"

• Avoid to display the actual number required
• Make clear that it is the same person whose posts were upvoted

Answer 5

Any "you shouldn't do that too much" will end up being a barrier to a good behaviour.

In this case, if you put limits on a max of upvotes, it will be associated with the idea that upvoting is not good, and limit upvoting in the end.

I think that the impact of "serial upvoting" is relatively limited, compared to the risk of making people upvote less.

Answer 6

The barrier against serial upvoting is destructive. I just hit it yesterday.

Example: https://stackoverflow.com/users/1539315/mattstep?tab=reputation. He's got a pretty low reputation, probably because he's only been around a year.

But he's the guy who writes the code that these answers address. Yes, he's the #1 world expert. So I went through and upvoted a bunch of his answers, because, well, just maybe he's the world's most qualified person to actually answer them.

But nooooo, those upvotes might be fraud. Sigh.