RobbBB comments on A few remarks about mass-downvoting - Less Wrong

17 Post author: gjm 13 February 2014 05:06PM

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Comment author: Emile 13 February 2014 05:38:30PM 9 points [-]

Time for a poll!

Systematic downvoting of users (that aren't spambots or obvious trolls) is wrong.

Systematic downvoting of users (that aren't spambots or obvious trolls) is against community norms (i.e. people should already know it's wrong).

It would be nice if admins had a way of automatically detecting such behavior (e.g. running an SQL query to pick up patterns of mass-downvote)

By the way, dear LessWrong reader, have you ever been a victim of mass downvotes?

And have you engaged in it?

(not that I think such polls should have power of law, it's just nice to have an idea of the opinion of the community)

Submitting...

Comment author: RobbBB 17 February 2014 02:23:45AM *  0 points [-]

Two features of this poll make me doubt its usefulness:

  1. You don't define 'systematic'. I've gone through user histories and looked at lots of their old comments, doling out lots of positive or negative karma in a short period of time based on the quality of the old comments. But I have no idea whether that makes me a 'systematic downvoter' or 'mass downvoter' in the sense people here are worried about. Your last question is particularly ambiguous, since it's not clear whether 'e.g. looking if a user has a history of other bad comments' is meant to be an example of 'systematic' or of 'not systematic' down-voting.

  2. You don't allow people to express agnostic or highly uncertain views about anything. You allow 'tends toward X' and 'don't care', but not 'I don't know'. I think I gave overly extreme answers because I do care about this issue and about whether it's harming the community, but I don't have a clear view yet of whether it's net harmful.

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