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wedrifid comments on Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough - Less Wrong
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Get a few more (thousand?) karma and you may find getting karmassassinated doesn't hurt much any more either. I get karmassassinated about once a fortnight (frequency memory subject to all sorts of salience biases and utterly unreliable - it happens quite a lot though) and it doesn't bother me all that much.
These days I find that getting the last 50 comments downvoted is a lot less emotionally burdensome than getting just one comment that I actually personally value downvoted in the absence of any other comments. The former just means someone (or several someones) don't like me. Who cares? Chances are they are not people I respect, given that I am a lot less likely to offend people when I respect them. On the other hand if most of my comments have been upvoted but one specific comment that I consider valuable gets multiple downvotes it indicates something of a judgement from the community and is really damn annoying. On the plus side it can be enough to make me lose interest in lesswrong for a few weeks and so gives me a massive productivity boost!
I believe you. That fear is a nuisance (to us if it keeps people silent and to those who are limited by it). If only we could give all lurkers rejection therapy to make them immune to this sort of thing!
I think if I were karmassassinated again I wouldn't care nearly as much, because of how stupid I felt after the first time it happened. It was just so obvious that it was just some idiot, but I somehow convinced myself it wasn't.
But that being said, one of the reasons it bothered me so much was that there were a number of posts that I was proud of that were downvoted - the guy who did it had sockpuppets, and it was more like my last 15-20 posts had each lost 5-10 karma. (This was also one of the reasons I wasn't so sure it was karmassassination) Which put a number of posts I liked way below the visibility threshold. And it bothered me that if I linked to those comments later, people would just see a really low karma score and probably ignore it.
I think you can't give more downvotes than your karma, so that person would need 5-10 sockpuppets with at least 15-20 (EDIT: actually 4-5) karma each. If someone is going to the trouble of doing that, it seems unlikely that they would just pick on you and nobody else (given that your writings don't seem to be particularly extreme in some way). Has anyone else experience something similar?
Creating sockpuppets for downvoting is easy.
(kids, don't try this at home).
Just find a Wikipedia article on a cognitive bias that we haven't had a top-level post on yet. Then, make a post to main with the content of the Wikipedia article (restated) and references to the relevant literature (you probably can safely make up half of the references). It will probably get in the neighborhood of 50 upvotes, giving you 500 karma, which allows 2000 comment downvotes.
Even if those estimates are really high, that's still a lot of power for little effort. And just repeat the process for 20 biases, and you've got 20 sockpuppets who can push a combined 20 downvotes on a large number of comments.
Of course, in the bargain Less Wrong is getting genuinely high-quality articles. Not necessarily a bug.
If restating Wikipedia is enough to make for a genuinely high-quality article, maybe we should have a bot that copy-pastes a relevant Wikipedia article into a top-level post every few days. (Based on a few minutes of research, it looks like this is legal if you link to the original article each time, but tell me if I'm wrong.)
Really, I think the main problem with this is that most of the work is identifying which ones are the 'relevant' articles.
I was implying a non-copy-paste solution. Still, interesting idea.
Yes; I didn't mean to say you were implying a copy-paste solution. But if we're speaking in the context of causing good articles to be posted and not in the context of thinking up hypothetical sock-puppeting strategies, whether it's copy-pasted or restated shouldn't matter unless the restatement is better-written than the original.
agreed
Modulo the fake references, of course.
of course
There's not much reason to do something like this, when you can arbitrarily upvote your own comments with your sockpuppets and give yourself karma.
But then those comments / posts will be correctively downvoted, unless they're high-quality. And you get a bunch more karma from a few posts than a few comments, so do both!
You can delete them afterwards, you keep karma from deleted posts.
Let's keep giving the disgruntled script kiddies instructions! That's bound to produce eudaimonia for all!
We found one of the sockpuppets, and he had one comment that added nothing that was at like 13 karma. It wasn't downvoted until I was karmassassinated.
It's some multiple of your karma, isn't it? At least four, I think- thomblake would know.
Yes, 4x, last I checked.
I should note that I have never actually been in your shoes. I haven't had any cases where there was unambiguous use of bulk sockpuppets. I've only been downvoted via breadth (up to 50 different comments from my recent history) and usually by only one person at a time (occasionally two or three but probably not two or three that go as far as 50 comments at the same time).
That would really mess with your mind if you were in a situation where you could not yet reliably model community preferences (and be personally confident in your model despite immediate evidence.)
Take it as a high compliment! Nobody has ever cared enough about me to make half a dozen new accounts. What did you do to deserve that?
It was this thread.
Basically it boiled down to this: I was suggesting that one reason some people might donate to more than one charity is that they're risk averse and want to make sure they're doing some good, instead of trying to help and unluckily choosing an unpredictably bad charity. It was admittedly a pretty pedantic point, but someone apparently didn't like it.
That seems to be something I would agree with, with an explicit acknowledgement that it relies on a combination of risk aversion and non-consequentialist values.
It didn't really help that I made my point very poorly.
Presumably also because people you respect are not very likely to express their annoyance through something as silly as karmassassination, right?