Are you sure that someone went ahead and did that and that you didn't just have a few downvotes of old top-level posts happen to occur within a short span of each other? Or alternatively someone could have been going through and reading your comments systematically and they disagreed with a lot more than they agreed so they downvoted more than they upvoted?
Nah, they were dropping in clumps of like 6 a piece every few seconds as I refreshed the page. It happens to other people too.
Is there any opinion or attitude of yours that you think would be particularly likely to trigger this sort of response?
Partially it is because I write about things like Thomism in a really obscure way that appears masturbatory. I generally disregard local norms of communication. People have no idea why I do this but they assume it's because I am either insane, extremely prone to compartmentalization, or choosing to defect against the tribe for some reason. It seems to them that I consistently choose not to provide evidence that would lead them to expect otherwise. I assume that they think that allowing such blatant defection makes LW look bad or generally sets a bad precedent and so feel justified in downvoting many of my comments into oblivion and occasionally downvoting all my posts. They don't often downvote all my comments too. Maybe they're trying to be subtle? The first time I checked LW and had 300 karma less than the previous day I wasn't quite sure what had happened and just ignored it. It's easy to miss.
The most recent mass downvoting could have been caused by one of two things. I think it's because I repeatedly told Eliezer that he sucks at reading in a very public thread but I'm not certain of that.
Nah, they were dropping in clumps of like 6 a piece every few seconds as I refreshed the page. It happens to other people too.
Who else has this happened to? The only other person I'm aware of this happening to is Curi after his conjunction fallacy post, and someone had apparently already done the opposite so he would have the karma to post it in the first place.
People who go back and downvote every post or comment a Less Wrong user has ever made, please, stop doing that. It's a clever way to pull information cascades in your direction but it is clearly an abuse of the content filtering system. It's also highly dishonorable. If you truly must use such tactics then downvoting a few of your enemy's top level posts is much less evil; your enemy loses the karma and takes the hint without your severely biasing the public perception of Less Wrong's discourse.
(I just lost over 200 karma in a few minutes and that'll probably continue for awhile. This happens to me every few weeks. Edit: I mean it's been happening every few weeks for a few months for a total of only three or four. Between 400 and 700 karma lost total I think? I don't mean to overstate the problem.)