I find it interesting that people do this. I'm going to use this as an opportunity to advocate doing the exact opposite: One thing I've found helps me listen to people more is when I'm having a disagreement with what someone else is saying over the course of a few posts, I go to their user page and find something that looks like it deserves an upvote and give it. This makes me much more willing to accept that the other person isn't being stupid, ignorant or otherwise just generally irrational on the point I disagree with them on.
It seems to me that the argument "the design is fine because you shouldn't even care about this feature" is wrong.
That a significant number of people seem to think comments like this have some value seems to me to be a bug in typical human reasoning, not a feature.
If the feature exists, it is hard for me to guess how one would not get value from paying attention to the users of the feature in optimizing its design.
Because LW is a multiplayer video game where you are winning when your team is getting more karma relative to the enemy player team. Whenever a video game is misdesigned to allow uninteresting grinding to contribute to winning, some people will do lots of uninteresting grinding to win.
An alternative would be to recognize that an upvote and a downvote are more orthogonal than opposite. A post or comment with 20 upvotes and 30 downvotes is clearly a very different post than one with 0 upvotes and 10 downvotes. A user with 2000 upvotes and 1500 downvotes is clearly a very different user than a user with 25 upvotes and 500 downvotes. If lesswrong simply reported upvote and downvote tallys side by side rather than netting them, a lot more information about posts, comments, and users would be available to readers. The current system is incapable of distinguishing between morons, trolls, intelligent newbies, and valuable and intelligent gadflies. Reporting positive and negative votes separately would help a lot.
Technically, I think this is more Trike's problem, so it would be more like 'how much more of Trike's time is this supposed to take up or be diverted from other LW maintenance/improvements?'
I want to point out that it is possible that some of these downvotes* could be honest assessments of a comment history. If a user notices you by reading one comment, that user might become interested in other comments you've written, and if this person didn't like one comment, he may also dislike other comments in which you express similar ideas.
* Which were not from me, because i have not read the conversation you linked to.
I say this because i realize that i have (arguably) done it before. I noticed a comment from one particular user which deserved to be downvoted. Then i read all the related conversations and downvoted the other comments in which that user repeated more or less the same thing. Then, i began reading earlier conversations in which that user had participated, and found that many of this user's comments were bad for similar reasons, but i did upvote about 10% of them that were good.
Overall, the user who had been downvoted saw a sudden karma drop within several minutes; they specifically made an accusation of retributive downvoting.
Long story short: on at least one occasion, a user who complained about mass downvoting was actually experiencing a rapid series of honest downvotes.
I would argue that when you do this, you owe it to the person you are downvoting to explain WHY you believe they are systematically wrong. A series of downvotes + one helpful comment is far preferable to a simple series of downvotes, even if it costs you karma to do so. As an example:
my response to an apparent troll comment on Brain Preservation
See, just smacking someone without telling them WHY you're smacking them leaves them to all sorts of conjecture as to what happened - if whomever had downvoted 30+ of my posts had left a single comment explaining why, I could have learned from it. As it is, I have no evidence to distinguish retribution from legitimate correction, and no data with which to correct myself even if it IS an attempt at legitimate correction.
Actually, thinking on this further, a series of downvotes plus an immediate comment explaining why is EXACTLY the right behavior - the sudden plunge in karma will get the user's attention, which they can then direct to the reply - the combination of mild social shaming, "score penalizing" and corrective explanation is a quite powerful way to drive home a lesson.
Someone spending their precious time going through someone's history to decrease their near-meaningless number as much as they possibly can is already losing. I hear about this happening so infrequently, and it's so totally inconsequential, that I don't think it merits thinking up/making changes to anything.
All protestations to the opposite aside, I very much doubt that karma is generally viewed as "near-meaningless". It is the main avenue of feedback and affirmation in what is often viewed as a rather intimidating environment (by newcomers especially).
As for those spending time with retributive downvoting, how do you know that they do not gain more satisfaction out of that than, say, watching the new BSG webisodes, using their "precious time". From Will_Newsome to Wei_Dai, I've seen even some veterans explain the importance they ascribe to karma. Would you laugh it off if your karma score were reduced to 0 by one guy with a few sockpuppets?
It's the only quantifiable metric in this social game. There even is a "top contributers" meta game on the sidebar. Of course all that makes it en vogue to pretend not to care, similar to wealthy people acting as if money weren't worth talking about.
If you truly don't care, good for you.
On individual comments and posts, the karma system is valuable for telling you if you're being stupid or not, and I appreciate it for that. The total karma score is (how long you've been on LW) (how often you post) (how much people like what you say); it says something like "how much you contribute to this site", which I find much less interesting, and I personally don't care if it's accurate.
I am, in fact, accusing people who downvote all posts by one person as using their time incorrectly; there are so many other things they could be doing that would make them happier and better-off, including nothing at all, that there's not much excuse for going through with it.
If my karma were reduced to zero, I would continue carrying on as I do now, commenting on this and that, and my karma would from then on be a positive number I don't pay attention to. A phlegmatic disposition has its advantages.
I've been retributively downvoted by one or two people over the past week and have lost about 110 karma. (Though I don't think I posted in the thread linked by the OP.) I agree that we need a system in place to correct and/or prevent abuses of the karma system.
At bare minimum, I think that LW should have a private log of users' up-vote/down-vote history accessible by the moderators. If someone complains of karma-assassination or the like, moderators could review the log and take appropriate action.
If I may make a suggestion, please pick a different user to perform that task on, rather than me. I would prefer to not have my karma distorted by primate pack-alliance instincts, for or against, and another user already performed corrective action against the original punitive action. Of course, if anyone comes across one of my posts and considers it worth upvoting, please do so - I just want to avoid systematic upvotes for exactly the same reason that I want to avoid systematic downvotes.
I think flagging for moderator attention is far superior to any automated response. I really like JoshuaZ's opposite approach, and I have no problem with someone repeatedly encountering a troll, and then going back and downvoting other trolling comments selectively. What I have a problem with is retributive downvoting without regard to the content of the comments being downvoted.
I'd be pretty happy to leave appropriate responses to moderator discussion. My suggestion would be something along the lines of undoing all downvotes that person made within the re...
It is also very interesting to notice that the subject is charged enough to provoke this kind of behaviour. I don't think it has ever happened on a discussion about a technical fine point of some decision theory.
This evidence increase the probability I have on the hypothesis: "LW crowd has totally failed in raising his own sanity waterline, on average. There are people who undoubtably increased their own, but they are more than compensated by people who get even more irrational on a rationality forum."
I think it could certainly be wise to implement a limit on the rate at which one can downvote posts by a specific user, or, if that's technically difficult to implement, the rate at which one can downvote fullstop.
The more involved measures you suggest would require effort, but I suppose the question becomes: what is LessWrong for? If it's actively for improving rationality, such measures could be worthwhile, assuming we could find or reroute some moderators / mentors / monitors.
Not that I've ever bothered to do this, but you're not being very charitable. Maybe they just looked over someones entire comment history and decided that they'd like less of everything that person said. It doesn't seem abusive to repeatedly downvote clear trolls. Obviously, some people may disagree as to who the trolls are, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't punish those you think are.
As to 1: I have no idea whatsoever, but we clearly have a proof of existence. As to 2: this seems like the problem of strategic voting. We want people to up and down vote in a manner that reflects their true opinion of the comment, but the karma aggregation system incentivises voting in a manner that reflects the maximum exaggeration of their opinion of the poster.
I realized a generalization from recording up and down vote total separately is to have a few categories of vote. Perhaps a post could be voted "up" "down" "agree" "disagree" "troll". In a system like this, it would be troll votes rising above a relatively low threshold that would grey-out or hide posts and comments.
I think this is somewhat clunky compared to just reporting up and down separately. But I wanted to throw the idea out there for those who wish to think about this question.
I recently had a 30 point karma hit.
I have an idea I want to run past everyone. It occurs to me that you could just team up with any other poster at all to ask for a karma infusion.
For instance, let's say you just received a bunch of 20 retributive downvotes on comments, and you teamed up with me.
You could message me and say "Michaelos, I just received a bunch of retributive downvotes on my last 20 posts. Could you give me a 20 point karma infusion?" And then I come by and upvote 20 of your posts, and your karma is back to where it was.
Also, if I want to be helpful on more than jus...
You could message me and say "Michaelos, I just received a bunch of retributive downvotes on my last 20 posts. Could you give me a 20 point karma infusion?" And then I come by and upvote 20 of your posts, and your karma is back to where it was.
Sounds easier to just google for an inspirational quote to pass of as a rationalist quote in the quote thread.
I think the system on stackoverflow.com works well. There, making a downvote on somelne else costs you something in your vote total, whereas upvotes are free. The result is that genuinely wrong answers get a few net downvotes, presumably from very high karma individuals who don't mind the expense, and who also are presumably a good choice for "arbiter" type roles given their very high karma. stackoverflow.com karma system is pretty detailed, with priveleges and permissions coming at higher and higher personal karma levels, but I would say "charging" for downvotes is the most relevant feature for the most improvement here on lesswrong.com.
Several people posted recently in a thread on women, mostly espousing feminist views - only to find that someone had declined to respond to their post, but instead browsed their history and downvoted every single comment or article they had ever posted.
I have two questions:
1. Why would you come to a site like this and pollute the karma system? How does it make you smarter? How does it make anyone else on the site smarter?
2. What would be a good technical workaround? In my mind, some system that detects mass-downvoting and flags a user for review would be preferable, but what should happen then? Should the system be more lenient to higher-karma posters? Who should perform the review process? What should be done with those whom the reviewer ascertains are abusing the karma system? I would prefer some kind of lesson that is more corrective than retributive - it seems to me that people who would perform this behavior are exactly the sort of people who need some of the lessons that this site provides. Any ideas?