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lmm comments on Self-serving meta: Whoever keeps block-downvoting me, is there some way to negotiate peace? - Less Wrong
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Comments (281)
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 :-)
(shrug) You're free to communicate using whatever media best express the thoughts you want to express. I will judge the result accordingly.
<shrug> "Judge" is an interesting word to use here, but you are, of course, free to judge to your heart's content.
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.
You just have to have public audits of the enforcers. Frankly, in this case, name-and-shame might be enough; ialdabaoth has seized the moral high ground by publicly offering truce.
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?
As I've said elsewhere... I endorse the "downvote what you want less of" metric. It follows that if someone wants me to stop posting here altogether, I endorse them downvoting every one of my posts. (Naturally, I endorse other things more.) So I'm reluctant to endorse automatic mechanisms to prevent such behavior.
That said, I would be OK with a lifetime sitewide cap to how many downvotes user A can issue to user B. I'd prefer making voting behavior public, but that has all kinds of other effects.
As for whether it's harmful to the site or not... I'd say it depends a lot on the user being downvoted.
Sure it does. But let's suppose that user A downvotes everything from user B, while most other users generally like the posts from user B. How likely is it that the community as a whole would benefit if the user B becomes discouraged by this behavior and leaves?
Let's assume the user A behaves this way towards users B, C, D. In this case we have one person trying to send away three people, that other users don't mind. How likely is this to improve the website?
Maybe it would be good to have some accepted way for the user A to express their dislike towards the user B, and let the community decide -- a democratic ostracism vote, instead of an assassination. The key is that the community as a whole expresses their opinion, not just one individual removes another individual.
Unlikely.
Unlikely.
Dislike is another matter entirely. What we're talking about is ways for A to express their preference that B not post here. And, as I've said, it seems we do have a way for A to express that preference: downvoting.
I agree with you completely that in the examples you list, and other similar examples where A's preference is a likely-mistaken one, any mechanism that allows A to effectively act on that preference will likely harm the site.
Sure, I endorse that.
For example, we could provide a mechanism whereby other users (E, F, G, etc.) can upvote contributions from users they consider valuable. Then the net karma score of users (B, C, D) would respect the collective opinions of the community as a whole, including but not limited to A's opinion.
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?
I don't know. I'm, tempted to make a snarky comment to the effect that they're too busy coming up with new unpopular changes like the karma penalty for replying to heavily downvoted comments. Snark aside, there have been prior requests for admins to deal with this, or if there's a programming issue to actually do deal with this. As far as I can tell, this request has been outstanding for a very long time.
I am gradually updating in favour of the hypothesis that at least one of the admins either approves of mass-downvoting as a means of influencing LW culture, or else has a strong enough dislike for the sort of ideas that appear to be be the targets of mass-downvoting at present that s/he considers the mass-downvoting to be a good thing.
I would find that rather surprising and extremely regrettable.
Who are the admins at present?
I have a prior that admins don't consider karma important and think of up/downvoting issues as middle-school-level status/power games. "Mommy, he hid all my pencils and wrote a bad word on my locker door!"
That's very possible.
It seems unlikely that both of these are true: (1) Having a karma system is a good thing for LW. (2) Issues related to the karma system, even ones that crop up repeatedly and produce a great deal of discussion and (it appears) strong feelings, should be treated as middle-school-level status games.
I don't think so: measures such as the hiding of below-threshold threads (pushed for by EY) make karma less unimportant that it used to be.
The way Eliezer treated eridu, and (IIRC) asked that the upvote/downvote buttons be re-added to user overview pages provided their “% positive” was low enough, make me suspect that too.
I think it's unlikely that Eliezer dislikes progressive ideas about gender that much, and all but impossible that Alicorn does. (What other mods are there?)
I asked about this a while ago, and apparently the software doesn't support 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"?
This is an example of how on Less Wrong we frequently oversimplify how status works. To state that as that simple just doesn't hold. For example, as this continues, my estimate for how likely it is that Eugine was actually behind this has gone up from around 10% to around 50%, and yes, that's got to translate into a status hit, and it is unlikely that I am the only person making such an estimate.
Yes. That would be easy. And it is striking that the very first time this was brought up, Eugine didn't even reply to express confusion or the like. And there are other solutions, for example if Eugine had responded quickly he could have simply made his votes public which one can do from preferences as I understand it. Of course, as time goes on, that option becomes substantially less persuasive because he would have had time to undo all those downvotes and then make them public.
That's interesting. Do you think it's true generally for some user X that, if I were to assert a belief that X was "behind this" and X did not respond, their lack of response would provide you with that much of a certainty-bump? Or is this unique to Eugine?
FWIW, were someone on LW to publicly assert their belief that I was covertly engaging in locally-disapproved-of behavior, I expect my response would be some version of "Interesting. Why do you believe that?" without confirming or denying it, and I doubt greatly that I would make my votes public in response.
Admittedly, were someone to PM me asking if I was doing that and if so why, I would probably answer honestly.
The certainty bump is a function of a variety of different aspects of the lack of response, including the fact that he didn't even say something like what you suggest about ""Interesting. Why do you believe that? And that he's not responded even as this thread has grown, and he didn't respond to either PMs (apparently) or the first public call out.
There's also an aspect of personalities that is relevant here. Frankly, I'd expect you to say something like your suggested response whether or not you were actually engaging in the behavior in question. If Eugine were not, given the rest of what I've seen of his interaction, I'd expect that he'd be substantially more likely to vocally deny it, since he's generally blunt. And the 10% to to 50% has included finding out related information such as the fact that twice before ialdabaoth made direct comments to Eugine about this that got no response at all. See here and here.
So I should clarify that the movement from 10% to 50% is not just Eugine's lack of denial, but the complete lack of response and finding out that this isn't a new thing at all but something that has happened repeatedly previously.
Wow. I agree that E_N's silence is evidence they're ialdabaoth's downvoter (not least because E_N doesn't generally shrink from confronting people about being wrong) but I wouldn't peg it as having a likelihood ratio of 5. More like 1.2 or 1.5, maybe. The only strong bits of evidence pointing at E_N are these two points ialdabaoth made. The other things, namely
are much more slender evidence. The Eugine Dunnit Hypothesis does seem to tie all of that evidence together nicely, but maybe that's confirmation bias. I'd better try thinking of contrary evidence:
Not sure what to make of it all.
I might be wrong (I don't use that feature) but I think that only makes votes on top-level posts public. (Though that information would still be suggestive.)
Edit: aaaand I only just saw your reply to TheOtherDave.
I agree strongly here. That's part of why my initial estimate was low. My initial estimate was based on the fact that there were around 5-6 users with enough karma and the apparent political motivation, and then I reduced that percentage for Eugine because he seemed unlikely to be the sort of person who would do something like this.
I've been block downvoted before, also on gender/sex issues, but I'm fairly confident that wasn't Eugine. On the other hand, I'm also fairly sure base on some things that I've seen that Eugine has downvoted people while he replies to them as part of an ongoing disagreement(Edit:And he seems to be doing just that to me right now in another conversation, which is sort of amusing at some level.) And this sort of thing seems indicative of the sort of attitude that would be more likely to go and engage in block downvoting. But even given that I agree it is out of character.
Right. Trying to explain all of this with one hypothetical super downvoter may be a problem. In shminux's case, he's got a lot of different controversial opinions that could potentially trigger something. The same applies to Imm's comment.
Hmm, in that case, this would be close to completely useless- all of ialdabaoth's submitted posts have multiple downvotes, so one could legitimately have downvoted almost all of them. The only that might be particularly interesting is this one which has only 2 downvotes.
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.
That's a strong argument. I'm convinced.
It's less strong than we thought. According to the comments in a more recent discussion, I had things the wrong way round: the downvoter wouldn't need 4 karma points per downvote, but could actually apply 4 downvotes per karma point. So the bar for downvoting ialdabaoth 200 times would be only 50 karma, not 800. In light of that, I think taking away someone's downvote button would be a lot less effective than I thought.
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.