Chrysophylax comments on Open thread, 11-17 March 2014 - Less Wrong
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Comments (226)
Most likely: Someone has taken exception to something you wrote and decided to go back and downvote a load of your old comments. It's a thing that happens. Victims complain about it from time to time. Eliezer says he's asked someone to look at the LW database for evidence of mass-downvoting but they haven't found anything useful; make of that what you will.
There are some grounds for thinking that people who make comments supporting (in rough terms) feminist views, and more generally but also more weakly "non-Reactionary" views, are particularly likely to attract the attention of mass-downvoters. (One might respond to this by avoiding such comments, or by defiantly making more of them.)
Less likely but not impossible: Someone has disliked something you wrote, gone back through your comment history, independently assessed the quality of each comment, and happens to have found ~25 comments that they think deserved downvoting on their own (de)merits.
[EDITED to add: Hello, downvoters! If you think something is bad about the above, please do let me know what. Otherwise, my working hypothesis is that the downvotes on this comment come from mass-downvoters who don't like being talked about. and I'll adopt my usual heuristic of responding to what look like mass-downvotes by posting more.]
Thank you. I'm still confused, though, because I started out at 0 karma for the month, making the changes in the numbers non-equal. I'm now on {16, 2}, which is consistent with {12,-2}, though.
Remember that the change in karma-for-the-month is the sum of two things: changes now and changes a month ago. So it can jump down even when nothing interesting just happened, if you got a bunch of upvotes 30 days ago.
But the big jump was in karma, not karma-for-the-month. My karma-for-the-month went down by two and my karma went down by 25. I'm now on {20, 5}, which is inconsistent with the {12, -2} and {16, 2} from earlier today.
Karma-for-the-month is karma on your last month's postings, not the last month's votes on all your postings. If your total plummets while KftM hardly changes, it means a bunch of old posts got downvoted.