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.
Malicious people will take advantage of whatever mechanism is offered.
If you allow comments but not downvotes, they will use comment spam. If you allow downvotes from new accounts, they'll do the bury-brigade thing. If you require posters to get accounts and use their legal names and real locations, attackers will stalk people, find their homes, scare their children, and leave poo on their doorstep. If you have a mechanism for automatic takedowns of copyright violations, they'll send forged DMCA notices. (Yes, even though it's illegal to do so. It's a comm...
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?