[Sololearn] Can upvotes be a violation?

Question

Sololearn's content creation guidelines name several sorts of post that justify a downvote.

Among these are spam, wrong answers, personal attacks and so on.

In many cases, when people 'misbehave' and violate some rule, they can be downvoted.

However, what if instead violating content is upvoted (and thereby supported)? Can this itself be seen as a violation?

In other terms:

There's downvote abuse, and moderation punishes it.

Is there also upvote abuse?

Answer 1

The only real way I can see upvotes being abusive would be if someone were to create an alternate account and upvote every activity of their main account. Although, that wouldn't really be "upvote abuse". It'd moreso be considered a "fair-play violation", which tends to be more severe than downvote-abuse, depending on the severity of abuse. Both downvote-abuse and fair-play violations are bannable offenses. Self-upvoting (upvoting your own content via a single account) doesn't award any experience-points, to my knowledge.

Answer 2

[1] Koder King™, well, I've been an opponent of *any* upvote activity that is not based on true appraisal for a long time:

1.) Self-upvote - because in my eyes it is indecent to end every statement with 'and what I just said was cool'.

2.) Pity-upvote - poor new user, let's upvote their code without even looking at it.

3.) Strategic upvote - 'I'm here, did you see?', 'Follow me, follow me!' and so on.

4.) Blind or habitual upvote - without even thinking or testing if what was written or coded is even any good.

For me, that is all dishonest and can only lead to a place and its inhabitants becoming more and more superficial.

Which has long since happened. Just see what happens in 'Hot Today' areas.

Okay, but things are what they are right? We can upvote whatever we want, there's no limit, let's express what we think and feel freely.

But here it becomes funny:

You can only express appraisal freely.

As soon as it comes to downvotes, it's suddenly about rules, and fairness and decency and all of that.

Answer 3

I self up vote my questions and comments all the time. To me, the lack of a vote on a comment seems like an eyesore; like a spec of dirt that needs to be dusted; like a dripping tap/fawcet that needs to be closed; like a C statement that lacks a semi colon; like some python code that is incorrectly indented; like an i that has not been dotted or a t that had not been crossed. A voteless, valid comment that is not spam which stares at me in the face will 95% of the time get my upvote attention, whether the comment was mine or someone elses.

Answer 4

In Africa we say when a Lizard jumps down from a tree nobody applaud it, it will applaud itself.

Answer 5

Ace, okay I can see how making a bunch of accounts to boost your main account is a violation.

But that's not what I mean.

We have the ability to upvote and downvote freely, our own stuff and the stuff of other people, right?

But if we downvote randomly, like you sometimes see people do in a feed post or something, at one point one of you platinum mods will show up and say something like:

'Okay, guys, we know who's downvoting everybody here. Reconsider within 24 hours or...'

So downvoting is not really free, but connected to certain rules, which are suggested in the guidelines.

Now from what I observe, there is no such rule for upvotes - or is there? I mean, if I run about Sololearn and just upvote EVERYTHING, will eventually someone show up and say:

'Okay, you've got 24 hours or...'

Answer 6

I rarely downvote posts other than those which are completely irrelevant to a thread, are spam or have profanity or threats.

Answer 7

[2] There is even a whole section in the content creation guidelines that describes what can legibly be downvoted (and by inference what not).

You can be banned for downvoting. You can be expelled.

And don't get me wrong - if someone's being a jerk and shooting down the stuff of other people, I want to see them punished.

Because they influence the balance of 'trendiness', 'visibility' and all that. They give other people a disadvantage and themselves an advantage by downvoting.

Because as a consequence, one value will end up higher than the other.

Only that *exactly the same* is true about upvotes‼️The relation between the values will be just the same, no matter if we downvote one thing or instead upvote another‼️

Only that in one case, we're all so concerned about fairness, rules, not being mean etc., while if someone becomes invisible because someone else is randomly upvoted, we couldn't care less.

Answer 8

Yeah, what Russ said is what I am worried about, and exactly what I'm seeing every day in question and answers:

People ask a question and immediately upvote it, which gives them an advantage over those who don't do it.

When there are still zero votes, people have to actually look at the question and might recognize that it's invalid, so downvote.

On the other hand, when they see 1+, they'll don't look so closely because subconsciously they are assuming someone (not the person) has upvoted, so it must be okay.

As soon as there are a few downvotes or upvotes, it won't matter anymore - the tendency will only become stronger, upwards or downwards.

Also, when two people post an answer, even if it's the same, the person who self-upvotes will be visibly +1, and will be higher, and will subconsciously suggest that their answer is better.

This often predicts how many upvotes they'll collect over the long term in that thread or post or code or whatever.

Answer 9

And this is only one small single self-upvote.

Take follower-bases into account, likestorms, secret groups, advertising etc., there'll be a huge impact that has nothing to do with the quality of the content but purely with tactics.

And some of these tactics (self-upvotes, likestorms etc.) can over the long term lead to an in my opinion unfair visibility advantage for people that's not based on quality but purely on shenanigans.

And then there's more serious cases.

It's not exactly what I was going to ask/talk about, but it does play into it.

Obviously very popular people won't care if they get downvoted. If everything they do is upvoted hundredfold anyway, why complain about a dozen naysayers?

But for less followed people, the broad base of learners, even one downvote - OR upvote - can make a difference.

Answer 10

mohamed souid your post is irrelevant and I just downvoted it 😐.

Answer 11

Well I couldn't really quickly find a relevant study by Googling but just discovered that in Reddit, your posts are by default automatically "self" upvoted at the time of posting, which makes complete sense to my way of thinking. However, based on the opposing views of users of these other social media as well I don't think that this issue about the appropriateness of self upvotes is going to be resolved any time soon with a global consensus.

https://amp-reddit-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/amp.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/aamqgp/why_does_reddit_allow_us_to_automatically_upvote/?amp_js_v=a2&amp_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQCKAE%3D#aoh=15750681667622&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2FTheoryOfReddit%2Fcomments%2Faamqgp%2Fwhy_does_reddit_allow_us_to_automatically_upvote%2F

Answer 12

HonFu nothing confusing about your question but still it kept me thinking.

I came late to this conversation so if I'm repeating a point, I don't have the time to go through others answers.

Down vote violation.
When a group of haters or something like that gang up against you and spam-down votes all your questions and/or posts. You'd report to the mods as abuse of the feature right?

Lemme ask you. How would you define up vote violation /abuse ?

I pondered over this as there is no such thing as that. Up votes can never be spammed or abused UNLESS, let's say your friends mindlessly up any of your questions or post which is impossible or you have multiple accounts for the soul purpose of doing that or you have a bot that continuously up votes your post after a certain period of time(maybe not in this platform) which is a violation of the rules.

Answer 13

ANDRONIC creating several accounts here in itself does not constitute a crime. It's only when these additional accounts are used to upvote yourself or to give yourself artificial challenge victories that the guidelines get breached.

Answer 14

Ace, but is that only annoying (depending on how you look at it) or an actual violation?

Because I have not seen that anybody had ever been reprimanded for self-upvoting or likestorming or whatever.

And it's really common. Makes you almost feel like a freak not doing it.

Answer 15

Hm, okay, I guess it won't happen a lot that people complain about being upvoted too much? ;-)

Why does the invisibility of downvotes alone make a difference in that regard, though?

Let me construct a case.

Someone posts a link to a site that we definitely don't want here, because there's children around. That's a violation, right?

Now let's say, in a short amount of time, 20 people (maybe all friends of the guy) upvote the thread, so it's 'hot today' or something for a while.

Would the people upvoting the violating content also be committing a violation, just by upvoting it, and therefore risk a ban or something?

Answer 16

I habitually downvote any question/answer if I notice that the person has self-upvoted because I feel it's making it more visible than it should be (especially as threads often default to ordering by vote). Am I wrong to be doing this?

Answer 17

Russ, I had considered that before, but refrained from doing it, because it might give self-upvoters a convenient excuse, turning things around:

'People downvote me, so why should I not defend myself by upvoting?'

Also, since self-upvoting doesn't seem to be a violation unless you use a bunch of extra accounts for it, would it even be valid?

Answer 18

Ace I'm not really worried about the xp someone gets. It's more that a question can look "better" when it has an upvote, than when it is neutral.

In my opinion, subconsciously you are more likely to give a post an upvote or more respect and consideration if it has already been upvoted. Self upvoting artificially promotes a post to me but, if I'm not supposed to downvote someone who does this, I guess I won't.

Answer 19

From the moment you use multiple accounts to rate yourself as positive in your own account, you are saying that your post or code was totally good, your positive rating makes no sense, because if we create something and go beyond time we post literally accept that that post is good, even if it's bad, because if it was bad we wouldn't post it, who would post something bad? so a positive rating is a rating in the dark, that is a vote that has nothing to do with it because we positively rate ourselves with the idea of ​​gaining image in what we do and not with the idea that our subject is really relevant to the public. Violation of the positive or negative ratings of a post, one thing is the same person classifying a post or code several times, another is the person receiving advantage for such an act. From that term to a rating violation by self-criticizing the post or code, positive or negative ratings show how relevant the post or code is to the public.

Answer 20

Sonic, if you can't stand the zero but also don't want to look complacent, you could downvote every other post of yours. 😏

On the other hand, you'll be anonymous, so your showcased modesty will completely go to waste. 😂