Is it vandalism when someone downvotes all the +10 questions specifically?

Question

Proposal: Home Automation

I notice that every week or two this happens. They never vote down the +20 or +16, and my intuition tells me that it's doubtful that this is because those two are just so awesome. If there aren't enough +10 questions, they'll nail whichever happens to be +9 at that time.

This is always designed to try to nail 5 questions that are moving us to our goal, we only needed 18 when I checked yesterday, now we need 23.

These can't be targeting the question's content (which might be valid), but always those questions just barely over the threshold. If these people wanted to guide the definition of the SE, that seems doubtful too... there are never more questions entered even though they can write up five of their own.

They might be unassociated, or even the same guy who manages to create a new account every week. I have no way of telling.

I'm not condoning strategic positive voting either, but it will take at least one more supporter's worth of upvotes just to counter-act this... if we only get one or two of those per week, they could keep it from going to the next stage indefinitely... which seems like it might be happening, we've long since had the requisite number of followers.

Answer 1

Actually, it's unfortunatelly by-design.

The problem is not a single user being able to downvote everything (the same applies to every site with little activity), but the fact that downvoting everything is possible, while upvoting everything not.

The number of downvotes should be equal to the number of upvotes, in order to prevent such situations. Or the voting concept should be redefined.

Answer 2

The FAQ points out:

If a proposal loses momentum, it may be re-evaluated or merged with similar proposals. Inactive proposals that do not receive any activity for one month may be deleted. Deleted proposals can be re-proposed anew by users with renewed energy and, hopefully, better resources to bring it to commitment.

It turns out the vast majority of proposals fail due to disinterest. Every month we close dozens of proposals with just one follower: the proposer. Proposals that languish in Definition for a year are closed and they tend to fall short because of lack of followers.

The pattern continues. In general:

• Proposals in commitment fail because not enough people show up.
• Private betas fail because not enough committers follow through.
• Public betas fail because participants lose interest.

At the end of the day Soylent Green Stack Exchange is people.

There are some games people play with example questions and to a degree strategic voting (both up and down) violates the spirit of the process. Downvoting questions with scores just short of 10 is the most effective way for one person to slow down the definition stage. But the tactic rarely stops it short because proposals that go on to be successful sites have an abundance of followers to counteract with upvotes.

As a matter of fact, the Home Automation site only needs 18 questions again. At this rate, it will be in commitment in 4 weeks or so. That will give the proposal even more followers ready to push it through commitment:

Answer 3

The number of people voting (up or down) is always a tiny fraction of people reading a topic.

So, if a organized group of people decides to methodically vote for something, there is a real chance their bullying could skew the results.

Mind, if it's just a single person with a grudge, then it's not going to be a problem.

I'd like to make a distinction

• it's not a problem if a single person is showing disapproval, even in a "tricky" way
• it should be "illegal" if a group of people is trying to push its own agenda, as they can in fact deal true damage to the community