That is sad on many levels. It is horrible that someone can be attacked in real life for writing a pony fanfiction. That's just... totally fucked up.
Unfortunately, she blames the website for having upvote and downvote buttons, because those -- using her words -- encourage antagonistic behavior. I support her right to not be harassed, but I don't agree with her conclusion. At least I don't think the presence of upvote and downvote buttons made LessWrong a hostile place... so obviously, there is something beyond the buttons. Buttons are just a community's tool to regulate itself. They cannot encode values. They express "want more" and "want less", but whatever is it that people want more or want less -- polite behavior or abuse -- that's up to them. The button is not able to encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior. At best, it can enable its users to do so; at worst, it can be useless.
The proposed solution of removing downvotes and keeping only upvotes is just a silly wishful thinking. Okay, let's have a site with upvotes only. Now a few people come there and start writing abuse, or start coordinating an attack on someone in real life. Hey, they can't be downvoted; they can only be upvoted! Because we have removed the antagonism buttons from the website. I guess it's obvious why such situation is not superior.
Sure, the administrator deleting the offending comments or banning the users, that would help (for a few seconds, until they register again, but don't underestimate the trivial inconveniences). Guess what; administrators can delete offending comments and ban users on websites with downvote buttons, too. So in my opinion the presence of the downvote buttons was not the problem; admins avoiding taking responsibility (beyond implementing the downvote button) for their website was. And perhaps there is something fucked up about the community that encourages or at least doesn't downvote abuse.
So... the story of the abuse is horrible, but the proposed solution (which makes a critical part of the story) is just silly.
The issue with the buttons is that 4chan has a campaign to mass downvote anything she does, maybe even bots to do this automatically. Her texts have disappeared from the main page even though they're very popular, and every comment she posts appears almost immediately with downvotes. The removal of downvotes wouldn't solve the underlying problem, sure, but it'd make the abuse much more difficult to implement as to remove her texts from public view it'd require the abusers to mass upvote everything else rather than just downvoting her own specific contributions.
So Eliezer said in his March 1st HPMOR progress report:
So I read that and it was certainly very much worth reading - thanks for the recommendation! Obviously, the following contains spoilers.
I'm confused about how the story is supposed to be "terrifying". I rarely find any fiction scary, but I suspect that this is about something else: I didn't think Failed Utopia #4-2 was "failed" either and in Three Worlds Collide, I thought the choice of the "Normal" ending made a lot more sense than choosing the "True" ending. The Optimalverse seems to me a fantastically fortunate universe, pretty much the best universe mammals could ever hope to end up in, and I honestly don't see how it is a horror novel, at all.
So, apparently there's something I'm not getting. Something that makes an individual's hard-to-define "free choice" more valuable than her much-easier-to-define happiness. Something like a paranoid schizophrenic's right not to be treated,
So I'd like the dumb version please. What's terrifying about the Optimalverse?