Vote manipulation is getting more common. Some recent examples:
While the accounts were banned, the malicious voting activity stuck around.
Should admins have the ability to discard votes, and if so, which admins? Should community mods have that ability? Can you think of any ways that tools like this could be abused?
Vote manipulation is done in both directions
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.
But your (one of) solution is to kill half of the voting system to solve half of the vote manipulation. It’s like solving spam by turning off comments. I don’t think that is going to be a popular opinion
That’s not killing half the voting system to solve half of the vote manipulation. Downvotes do not even get used at the same ratio as upvotes. I’m sure someone can pull numbers, but I’d roughly estimate that in most communities no more than 10% of votes are downvotes. And even if they were, I’m not sure you quite parsed my full comment.
Blocking voting on fresh accounts is not a novel idea. As another commenter said, it’s the system used on Stack Overflow. Blocking all downvotes is not even the goal. The goal is to make brigading not worth the effort. The worst case scenario is that all downvotes get disabled (which still works, despite its unpopularity - it’s been implemented by instances like beehaw). But in the end, that’s just a baseline. It can be improved, and I like to believe that I was quite clear on that in my first comment.