It took me a while to realise that this was not a picture of the package chewed up by a cat.

Electric Callboy. I’m generally not fond of metalcore, but their songs are very catchy.

The politicians debating online abuse claim to mean well.

I know? I didn’t say it didn’t happen, I said that positive vote manipulation can more easily be addressed with spam prevention measures.

Corollary: Don’t assume you’ll have access to your accounts forever.

Yep. One can definitely have a heated debate about the merits of one process over another, when the outcome is constructive. That’s a rational argument.

Trolls on the other hand get “you’re not arguing in good faith, this conversation is over” and a block.

As much as it pains me, I think the only solution to vote manipulation is to disable downvotes. Mind you, I don’t like it - I think downvotes are useful in a healthy self-governing community - but here’s my rationale as to why it’s the only solution:

• The goal of negative vote manipulation is to remove visibility from content. For that, the first few hours of the post’s or comment’s lifetime are critical. Sure, a mod can remove the downvotes, but it would likely be done after the content’s attention window is over, so the damage would be done. [1]
• Positive brigading (artificial boosting of content) is another problem, but out of scope of this post. I consider it to be in the “dealing with spam” category.

1. As I’m writing this, it comes to mind that perhaps we can selectively disable downvotes? Just like some instances don’t allow fresh accounts to post, perhaps something similar can be done for downvoting. Maybe it can also be extended to accounts below a certain up- to downvote ratio, to avoid mass downvoters.

That’s a weird way to announce the Ski Bud movie…