It kind if seems like a false alarm if one of the botters was just RiderOfGiraffes (whose motives I don't suspect), and there was only one other person, possibly equally innocent.
One would hope nobody here is irrational enough to seek 'easy/automatic' karma ... I mean the nice thing about karma for submissions is it's basically a whole lot of smart people saying 'well done for finding this, it's definitely valuable.' If there's no real finding involved then what's the point? You're the only person your karma matters to.
> the nice thing about karma for submissions is it's
> basically a whole lot of smart people saying 'well
> done for finding this, it's definitely valuable.'
That doesn't really seem to be the case any more. There's a lot of stuff coming up on the Front Page now that I, personally, think is not valuable at all. It's not spam, so I feel disinclined to flag it, but I can't downvote it either. I think there are a lot of older hands who are starting to despair that so much trivial material makes it to the Front Page, and there seems to be no way of stopping it.
There is no doubt in my mind that the community has been diluted in its intent, purpose and interest. Often the new people have insightful and interesting things to say, but the focus is largely gone as compared to what attracted people in the first place.
One can no longer assume that just because an item has a high score, it must be of value. The interesting thing is that this is true of the Classic page as well.
And I've checked my snapshots from 2 years ago, and it really does seem to have changed.
People are upvoting things not because they are valuable, but because they are entertaining.
> People are upvoting things not because they are valuable, but because they are entertaining.
That's the biggest change I've noticed as well, and I would expand your observation to cover comments too. it seems like jokes get upvoted significantly more often now than they did a year or two ago.
From a top-down perspective the karma vote are less meaningful, as certain topics and sources get up voted ad nauseum. But from the bottom-up perspective, it's still great when you pluck an academic article or technical blog from obscurity and thousands of people read it, sending the karma from 1 to hundreds. And there are other people trying to do the same thing. You can usually avoid the chaff just by reading the title or domain (personally i skip the 'motivational' type blogs and try to resist the 'hot topic' ones and contentious debates, but there's still so much good technical content that crops up, and fairy high maturity among commenters).
One would hope nobody here is irrational enough to seek 'easy/automatic' karma ... I mean the nice thing about karma for submissions is it's basically a whole lot of smart people saying 'well done for finding this, it's definitely valuable.' If there's no real finding involved then what's the point? You're the only person your karma matters to.