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Larks comments on On Debates with Trolls - Less Wrong
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Comments (248)
Upvoted for admirable restraint in not linking or naming.
Several times the troll mentioned he was forced to slow down posting by the site. Was this because of low karma? If so, can we just penalise people more for massively negative karma?
Apparently there is a 10 minute countdown between comments if you have negative karma.
That might not have helped in this particular situation.
OK we can't hope for a fully attack-resistant trust metric, but I'd like to do a little better than this.
Inability to create discussion posts for users with negative or zero karma was already proposed when we were experiencing attacks of spambots. I don't know whether it has been implemented already, but suppose it hasn't.
It has been. It isn't clear how they were able to post the top level post so late. Some have suggested that they made additional accounts to vote up their older posts but I don't know of any evidence of that. Unfortunately, there's very little in the system that makes detecting that sort of thing very easy.
(ETA: By "they" I mean the potential troll, not the spambots.)
Spam stopped immediately when having positive Karma became a requirement. Only a few spam messages appeared in comments after that, AFAIK.
Yes, sorry, by "they" I meant the troll in question, not the spambots. Bad wording on my part.
I'd be surprised if that helped very much in cases like the one under discussion, given that nothing stops people from creating new accounts. That's enough to stop casual spammers, which is great, but I'd expect anyone willing to sink hours into writing comments to also be willing to create new accounts on demand when their karma got too low.
More generally, I'd be surprised if any change to the karma system itself rendered us significantly less vulnerable to that sort of dedicated resource-grab without introducing negative side effects.
My own feeling is that the best immune system is cultural, here. To the extent that LW members find participating in discussions like that one valuable (there's a defense of that position here, for example), we will continue to periodically experience such discussions.