The morning after

Question

As we all know, there has been a great amount of malicious voting. As we all know, there has been a correction.

Right.

What I really need to get of my chest:

• If you think you should make corrections (in general, which I think you should) you should never have waited this long. It has been clear for a long time there was malicious voting. Although used methods were no doubt smart, at least partially they were kind of clear to me, and no one told me. Just think what is possible and assume it happens.
• For a long time we were told to trust the system, which I did. Now we have to accept the used algorithms were appropriate, which I don't. I really appreciate the ones who took the effort to undertake this courageous operation, but really I don't. In the list of "corrections", I see un- accepts (while the answer is still accepted) from people I am 100% positive they were not involved in any malicious voting.

Even more: the truth is that no algorithm, no calculation can look inside the minds of people who obviously voted (among others) in a malicious way, and decide on (far) over 100.000 reputation afterwards if it is unjust or not. Please don't suggest you can, you can't. Nor can you decide an average effect of it, without making a wild guess.

You simply shouldn't have let it gone this far.

Answer 1

I honestly believe everybody involved would agree with you, Jacob.

In a perfect world, this system would have been in and running before Ask Ubuntu was even started. But it wasn't. It has taken years of watching how people abuse the system to work out how deep social ties can be.

It is also important to reiterate that this is not just people voting for other people. It is also how they're voting for those people. While you're right that it's impossible to definitely say what somebody was thinking when they voted, consider that it is possible to work out that they were serially voting for a single person. I won't spell it out, but (almost) everything is logged.

While I'm reiterating I should also point out that the people worst affected by this are the victims here. People have inappropriately latched onto you instead of the site. There's no animosity from the mods here. We still love you and your answers.

We have to move on from this. All of us. Together. For two reasons:

1. The site needs people like you. Your answers, maturity, experience makes us all better. Without you the site is worse. Support for the Ubuntu community is worse.
2. We have a moderator election. I would be very sad if the best possible candidate didn't put themselves forward because of this.

I understand that I'm asking you [all] to forgive what must have been a horrible and seemingly punitive experience but it needed to happen to keep the site fair.