Vote manipulation is getting more common. Some recent examples:
While the accounts were banned, the malicious voting activity stuck around.
Should admins have the ability to discard votes, and if so, which admins? Should community mods have that ability? Can you think of any ways that tools like this could be abused?
Because it affects visibility of content.
Read OP’s post, they’re worrying about manipulation, not karma whoring or harassment.
Stuff like bots mass up or downvoting a post to promote or hide it.
Downvotes don’t seem to be much of a factor in post visibility, at least in scaled mode?
They are in /hot/, which is likely to be vastly more common than scaled.
Not if you sort be New.
If we expect to be remotely large, sorting by new only is infeasible.