How do cliques and bots ruin online voting?
High-status users and power abusers use heavy downvotes and sock puppets to punish corrections, while upvote rings and bots flood platforms with unthrottled comments and scams. This cliquey strategy and manipulated visibility ruins discussions and degrades the overall quality of the site.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1Ignoring karma and not worrying about the voting systemDid this help you?
- 2Switching to the 'new' view to avoid repetitive homepage contentDid this help you?
- 3Choosing not to pay attention to user reputation when engagingDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“Often, an account like this will post a comment demonstrating they have no clue what they’re talking about, and when someone even lightly corrects them what happens? They immediately abuse their power with heavy downvotes and sock puppets they can easily promote with their heavily weighted votes.”source ↗
“This is a shit-for-brains cliquey strategy that makes the site worse than it could otherwise be.”source ↗
“The site is unfortunately filled with rampant upvote rings, AI agents / bots commenting, users that have certain privileges who can rapidly comment and reply without getting throttled and now we have slop filled posts in Show HN and some instances of crypto memecoin scams.”source ↗
Where this came up
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