Below is a message I just got from jackk. Some specifics have been redacted 1) so that we can discuss general policy rather than the details of this specific case 2) because presumption of innocence, just in case there happens to be an innocuous explanation to this.
Hi Kaj_Sotala,
I'm Jack, one of the Trike devs. I'm messaging you because you're the moderator who commented most recently. A while back the user [REDACTED 1] asked if Trike could look into retributive downvoting against his account. I've done that, and it looks like [REDACTED 2] has downvoted at least [over half of REDACTED 1's comments, amounting to hundreds of downvotes] ([REDACTED 1]'s next-largest downvoter is [REDACTED 3] at -15).
What action to take is a community problem, not a technical one, so we'd rather leave that up to the moderators. Some options:
1. Ask [REDACTED 2] for the story behind these votes
2. Use the "admin" account (which exists for sending scripted messages, &c.) to apply an upvote to each downvoted post
3. Apply a karma award to [REDACTED 1]'s account. This would fix the karma damage but not the sorting of individual comments
4. Apply a negative karma award to [REDACTED 2]'s account. This makes him pay for false downvotes twice over. This isn't possible in the current code, but it's an easy fix
5. Ban [REDACTED 2]
For future reference, it's very easy for Trike to look at who downvoted someone's account, so if you get questions about downvoting in the future I can run the same report.
If you need to verify my identity before you take action, let me know and we'll work something out.
-- Jack
So... thoughts? I have mod powers, but when I was granted them I was basically just told to use them to fight spam; there was never any discussion of any other policy, and I don't feel like I have the authority to decide on the suitable course of action without consulting the rest of the community.
Not really. This is my own lived experience comparing Usenet to Google Groups, Reddit, web forums, and Wikipedia, and noting the explosion of user-contribution in the shift from Overcoming Bias to LessWrong. You could easily prove Usenet is declined, but I'm not sure what research you could do to prove that the incentives were structured wrong or that features like killfiles fostered complacency & reluctance to change, other than to note how all of Usenet's replacements were strikingly different from it in similar ways.
My read is that killfiles were a major aspect of systematically bad design of Usenet which made it uncompetitive and unscalable: it increased user costs it should not have, adding friction and trivial inconveniences. Killfiles express a fundamental contempt for user time: if there are 100 readers and 1 spammer, it should not take 100 reader actions to deal with the 1 spammers, as killfiles inherently tilt matters. What would be much better is if 10 readers take an action like downvoting and spare the remaining 90. Rinse and repeat. What is better, dealing with spam/trolls while using O(1) or O(n) in reader time?
The non-Web thing is another example of this. Yes, an uber-nerd (and buybuydandavis is exemplifying this attitude in this thread) may contemptuously look at it as an irrelevant problem: 'what sort of person can't maintain a good killfile? or figure out how to deal with NNTP servers and ports and local clients?' But it's a big deal when repeatedly incurred by millions of people who do not wish to become uber-nerds and to whom costs matter.
Of course, all of this could have been fixed. But they weren't fixed in time, and so Usenet stagnated and died.
As I recall, at least the parts of usenet where I hung out (rec.art.sf.written, fandom, and composition, and soc.support.fat-acceptance) weren't that badly plagued by spam (there were volunteers dealing with spam for usenet), but trolls were a problem.