THE MAD THUMBER

Yeah, right--I've had one beer and one glass of wine (which I did not finish) in the last 30 years. Your definition of alcoholic and mine differ considerably.

Oh that you would only follow your own advice. The pose of mature adult is entirely unconvincing, when my posts here keep getting voted down whenever you show up.

The mayhem continues. Posts by conservatives at this site are being voted up left, right and center, and posts by those who are not the usual suspects in conservative circles are being voted down. This has happened within the last few minutes in a thread about abortion.

Oh yeah, I think in this latest spate of puerile pettiness that we can clearly see where the problem lies.

Here's a new avatar image for Lash:

I'm sure you know it isn't the alcohol that drives the personality of the alcoholic, it's the relentless rage. Alcohol is the temporary balm.

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This would be relevant information on a thread about alcoholism.

I hope anyone reading this, unhappy with the low level of 'discourse' here, will think about advocating for some agreement among members to avoid some of this constant, tribal infighting.

You sure purport to know a lot about alcoholism--personal experience, I guess. There's no "rage" here--you're just not that important.

As for tribal in-fighting, that's really hilarious, given how you and your conservative cronies prance around pretending you're a "progressive," and a "leftist." The posts in which Layman, Finn or any number of other local conservatives congratulate you for your good sense for a "progressive" constitute humor on the Three Stooges level. You've really got a gall to hand out advice about maturity and civility.

The thumb monkeys roaming around provide ample evidence that the thumbsdown feature is a liability for a2k. That's the real message here. The rest is noise.

Unfortunate associations with alcoholics lead a lot of people to read about it and attend meetings. I do know quite a bit. I definitely recognize it when I see it.

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Anyone who has encountered you here knows that you are a furious person, waiting for any excuse to spill a bunch of insults. It is probably the one thing everyone here can agree on, though your cronies probably won’t say publicly.

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You need to stop routinely calling me a liar unless you want me to go toe to toe with you about my personal opinion of you. You decide.

I certainly agree with that statement. At Quora, one can block comments on one's posts, and if someone does vote down one's post, one knows who did it and when it was done.

Ah-hahahahahahahaha . . .

Me calling you a liar? I've reported you for calling me a liar again and again and again . . .

As for furious, I will, tediously, point out what I've pointed out again and again in these fora. Saying that someone is angry is a silly attempt to portray one's interlocutor as emotional and therefore not rational, while one poses as the voice of sweet reason. You can't hear me, you can't see me, you can't see my "body language," so that's all bullshit on your part. You are far more likely to indulge in name-calling than I am, In Bernie's thread, I've reported you time and again for calling me, and for calling others "liar." I've done that many, many times.

I don't think it is a liability, but anything that can be abused will be. This particular thumber is likely a bot. It's fairly easy to write a bot that will screen certain users or topics and trigger the button. (I am no expert, but I think I could write one.) I think it's a bot because it is indiscriminate and extensive, but it's also pretty focused. Perhaps, someone with some programming skills and an axe to grind.

While I think that is a plausible explanation, it cannot be denied that the problem has ballooned in the last day or two. The bot would probably explain why your post in an ESL thread was voted down, as was one of mine in an ESL thread, just this morning. But within the last day or two, the posts of some members have received several down votes, and those of other members have received many up votes. That is much less plausibly accounted for by the use of a bot. One can only vote down or vote up a post once, so several down votes or several up votes means that several members are involved.

Actually, I noticed this as well that post have been voted down and up several times within a rather short period - even at 1am ET this morning.

Oh yeah, several of your posts in Bernie's thread were voted-down overnight. I voted them up again, but of course, I can only do that once.

I was looking at the "Why I left" thread and saw that Oliver's and CI's posts were targeted by Revelette's posts were skipped so it's pretty selective and coming from several accounts. I remember several years ago, some organizations were intentionally down voting certain topics to influence search engine results, but I don't think votes on A2K do that. This feels a lot more like a vendetta, a particularly wide ranging one.

Check out pages 1-3 of this thread.

If a feature can easily be abused, it's a liability, a weakness.

Nods. It’s like Kim Dot Com is pissed at Setanta and maybe a few others.

I do think, too, that it is selective, now coming from several accounts and a vendetta.

Agreed. Pop over to Reddit for a few and you'll find their upvote/downvote system is a point of contention in any thread where the slightest of opinions could be expressed on a topic.

I said my piece about the thumbs being a problem for a site that fancies itself an "inclusive community" a few years ago, and was summarily shut down on the basis that the thumbs serve as a function beyond whether or not somebody likes a post/member or not. I left it at that, but it's really kind of a copout, as though there were no other way to implement a "hide post" feature. To this day, I still don't fully understand the function of the thumbs, and a search indicates that I'm hardly alone there, but it's evident to me that the concept is poor design.

But even if the function of hiding topics was properly separated from the thumbs, obviously there could still be the abuse being discussed here. And even if the down thumb were eliminated completely, I'm sure bots could be written to just upvote certain posts. There are many forums that have a "thanks" or "like" option, where the username is attached to said thanks or like, and this would to me be as good a way as any if the powers that be wished to maintain the common tip-of-the-hat feature. Of course, I'm also not clear on whether or not the authors of a2k intend any future development..

Um, seems to me many of you folks care way too much... A2K isn't exactly the #1 up and coming user-participation q&a site on the Internet; as far as I can tell, it has nobody running it and has had no feature updates in years, so spending a lot of energy discussing how it should have been implemented is rather pointless, and maybe I'm alone on this but I haven't even paid attention to this thumb thing... If we get some prize or cash award by having the most thumb-ups, I certainly haven't heard about it.