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Pablo_Stafforini comments on Self-serving meta: Whoever keeps block-downvoting me, is there some way to negotiate peace? - Less Wrong
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If you think you know who's doing it and your only purpose is to persuade this person to stop doing it, why didn't you just write him or her a private message? Given your state of knowledge and your stated goals, a public Discussion post seems unwarranted.
I've attempted that, to no avail. This is the terminus of an escalating sequence of requests.
Making a scene sends them the message that what they are doing hurts you, thus their strategy is working. This will incentive them to continue.
If it continues, I'd like to see a search done for the culprit, have them publicly exposed, and their account permanently locked or destroyed. There's no place for that kind of personal grudge in the future I wish to live in.
That sounds awfully like the kind of witch-hunt that I would have hoped rational groups were above.
Witch hunts are characterized by lack of evidence; that should not be the case here. The admin in charge of the system should be able to pull up the relevant data, do ten minutes of analysis, and say definitively yes or no whether there's abusive downvoting going on.
If there is, I'd like to see action taken, because karma is one of our better quality indicators on the site.
You're right; I guess it's not the witch-hunt side so much as the ad-hoc mob rule that bothers me. I express controversial views on LW, both through my posts and through my moderation; I think the fact that one can do so is one of the most valuable things about the site. The idea that one could be severely punished for an action that didn't violate any specific rule, but was merely something many in the community disagreed with, would be very chilling.
(shrug) One person's "ad-hoc mob rule" is another's "collective self-moderation".
For my own part, I endorse the collectively self-moderating aspect of LW, of which downvotes are an important aspect. Yes, it makes the community vulnerable to various forms of self-abuse. Eliminating it also makes the community vulnerable to various forms of self-abuse, which are not clearly superior, to say the least.
For my own part: I endorse people downvoting what they want to see less of on the site.
If Sam wants to see less of George posting on the site, it follows that I endorse Sam block-downvoting every one of George's comments. I'm a little squeamish about that, and I would prefer that Sam had different preferences, but if it comes down to that I stand by the endorsement.
If I post something that many in the community disagree with, and those community members want to see less stuff they disagree with, I endorse those community members downvoting me. That I didn't violate any specific rule is, to my mind, entirely irrelevant; I would prefer that our goal not be to encourage rule-compliance.
I do recognize that many people here use different downvoting metrics than that... e.g., downvote-what-I-disagree-with, downvote-what-I-oppose-socially, downvote-what-I-consider-overly-upvoted, downvote-things-that-evoke-negative-emotional-responses, various others. I don't endorse those metrics, and I'd prefer they didn't do that, but I acknowledge that interpreting karma behavior correctly requires recognizing that these people exist and do what they do.
Even leaving all of that aside, I also recognize that many people here have different preferences than I do regarding what kinds of things get said here, and consequently things get downvoted that I upvote, and things get upvoted that I downvote. This is as it should be, given things as they are.
I think you misunderstand. I approve of downvoting (and disapprove of certain ways of using it), but I disagree in the strongest possible terms with Dentin's "I'd like to see a search done for the culprit, have them publicly exposed, and their account permanently locked or destroyed."
Ah. Yes, I misunderstood. Sorry; thanks for clarifying.
Flamebait
If you'd expressed a thought in words, I'd respond to it in words.
Given that you're tossing emotionally charged images around instead, I guess I'll reply in kind.
I don't see why communication has use words and nothing but words :-)
When a newcomer starts trolling the site, they could very easily have a full corpus of contribution of, say, six posts, all of which are unambiguously worthy of downvoting. A rule which institutes a blanket prohibition against downvoting all of someone's posts isn't robust against circumstances such as those.
A possible solution would be to require one to solve a captcha, and to notify an admin, when someone downvotes more than 10 comments/posts by the same author in a one-hour period (or something similar).
Too damned easy to rules-lawyer. You can't downvote all of someone's posts, but what percentage can you downvote?
Not all regulatory regimes are based on rules. How about a principles-based regime? The relevant principle in the present case seems to be "don't be a bag of dicks".
I am suspicious of principles-based regimes because they give too much discretion/power to the enforcers and that it likely to lead to the usual consequences.
Desrtopa makes a good point. The problem is less with downvoting all of someone's posts, and more with downvoting all of someone's posts without good reason. If there's going to be a rule it should target the latter: mass downvotes that can't be justified on the basis of the comments' actual contents.
In any case, formalizing a rule might be overkill. One person could well be responsible for block downvoting not just ialdabaoth but also daenerys, NancyLebovitz, shminux & Tenoke. Five minutes of database access would suffice to check that, and if all this downvote spamming is just down to one person, taking away their downvote button ought to do the trick.
The weird downvotes I've gotten don't match the pattern other people have mentioned. Instead of mass downvoting of comments, I get a very early downvote (maybe a bit more than one, I haven't checked carefully) on posts. It might be a different person.
I agree that mass downvoting is bad for the community, with no obvious upside to permitting it. Taking away the perpetrator's downvote button seems like a reasonable punishment.
Thanks for expanding. That does make it sound more likely your downvoter isn't whoever's downvoting ialdabaoth.
There's another reason to check: right now, we have an outstanding accusation against a respected user in the community . That user has not responded to that accusation. In a court of law (at least in the US), that would (generally) not be allowed as evidence of guilt, but from a Bayesian standpoint it does seem like P(Eugine Nier is systematically downvoting|Eugine doesn't deny it)> P(Eugine is systematically downvoting|Eugine denies it).
Now, there are other plausible explanations also for why he has decided not to comment, and at this point, I'd assign no more than 50% or so that he's responsible for this situation. If he's not responsible, then his name is being unfairly dragged through the mud, and that should be stopped. So it is important simply for that reason to have this cleared up. My own emotional biases may be coming into play here, in that although I disagree with Eugine on most of the issues that seem to be triggering mass downvoting (essentially on the progressive end of the gender and race issues), I've generally found him to be one of the more reasonable and polite people to disagree with here, so I'd really like to have it confirmed that he's not at fault here.
If my memory serves me well, I probably did agree with him on many issues, but anyway, if the accusations are true, I would consider such behavior very harmful for the website (and frankly, also an evidence for some mental problems). I mean, downvoting someone even when they announce a meetup... what the hell?
Is it technically possible for admins to check who's downvoting whom, and if so, why the hell are they leaving us speculate rather than just friggin' doing it?
Replying is the low status option. Not acknowledging the authority of the accuser is the high status option.
After all, what would Eugine say? "No, you are wrong, I didn't do it"?
If someone cares enough to do this now, they likely simply make an alternate account, get a little karma from that account and then continue downvoting using that. This is at best a short-term, temporary solution.
I considered that outcome but I'm not too concerned about it. ialdabaoth got at least 200ish downvotes, so someone would need 800 karma to repeat that feat (and that's assuming they've only targeted ialdabaoth). A "little" karma won't do it.
A determined person could certainly gather 800 karma, but the effort involved would have a fair chance of deterring them. Even if it didn't deter them, recouping the karma would take a while, and we could simply revisit the issue with fresh eyes if/when the downvote bombing eventually resumed.
If block-downvoting is a problem, which it sounds like it is, then yes we should consider modifying the rules to resolve it. But any such rule should be objective (to the extent that people don't violate it by accident), and shouldn't be applied retroactively to people who block-downvoted before the rule existed.
Yes, with the understanding that the rule covers the common edge cases in some sane fashion.
There should not be such a rule (I forgot to vote anonymously); what there should be is enough voting happening that bulk downvoters are lost in the noise. It's hard to make a rule to cause that, of course.