Post History

Need to throttle users with consistently bad posts.

Now that Codidact has some experience to look back on, we can see the same thing happening here as in other on-line places and in real life.  

We are all here for our own personal selfish reasons.  However, most of us understand what these sites are trying to achieve, and feel it would be wrong to interfere with that.  Even if that argument doesn't work, most realize that if enough people drag the sites down, then there will be nothing here any of us came for.  We therefore at least try to do no harm.  We consider it rude to be a net negative, and would be embarrassed to be caught doing that.

However, there are always some that don't care about what the collective is trying to achieve nor what others think of them.  They don't care about being seen as rude, and won't be embarrassed.  They are here only to maximize personal gain, regardless of how much it might degrade the collective goals.

As Elsewhere has abundantly shown us, no amount of explaining, urging, or negative feedback makes any difference to these vampires.  Without real negative consequences, they have no reason to change.

<h2>The vampires are here</h2>

Most sites have at least one resident vampire whos questions are consistently downvoted.  They are easy to find.  Go to a site and scroll down the questions looking for negatives.  You will see the same few users repeatedly.  Then go look at the profiles of those users and see their negative rep.

If you do this on several sites, you will notice a pattern of the same problem-users across the sites.  If you dig a little deeper, you will also see the same feedback given to these users on different sites.  However, they don't care.  They just keep doing the same thing over and over again.

Why do they do persist?  Because there is no reason not to.

<h2>The wooden stake</h2>

How to fix this?  There have to be <b>negative consequences</b>.  This means the vampires need to be deprived of something they want.  What they apparently want is to post a lot of (bad) questions.  The system therefore needs to deprive them of the ability to post questions.

<h2>Question rate throttling</h2>

We need rate-limits on questions for users with negative rep.  The algorithm could be as simple as you have to wait one day between questions for each negative count.  For example, if a user is at -7 rep, then they can't post a question within 7 days of posting the previous question.  That doesn't get in the way much for the occasional -1 and -2 reps.  However, it becomes a serious impediment for those consistently posting bad questions.  We have a couple of users with over -50 rep.  That's a definite pattern, and those users <i>should</i> be seriously throttled.