You see nothing reasonable about being perturbed if "many" people in your community not only dislike you but make a point of indicating that dislike?
Many people in a community of hundreds or thousands. To the extent that anyone has noticed you, some like you, and some don't. This is a fact you should have been able to infer without seeing any karma votes.
Keep your eye on the ball: I wrote, adding emphasis this time, "not only dislike you but make a point of indicating that dislike". You, for whatever reason, then skipped over that second part and zoomed in on the mundane fact that some people who post here dislike some other people who post here.
Be perturbed if it floats your boat. Nurse and cherish your perturbation. The issue again is failing to do something you want to do because some people have publicly indicated something you should have known in the first place.
Again I find I have to repeat myself with emphasis: "that in itself [i.e. having people publicly display their contempt for you] can change 'something they want to do' to 'something they no longer want to do'."
It sounds like the mental model you have of this kind of situation is missing a dimension. The information transmitted when X pointedly & publicly signals their dislike of Y to Y is not simply, "I dislike you". It's closer to "I dislike you, and I dislike you to such a degree that I'm willing to express that fact in spite of whatever social friction it causes between me and everyone else, and in spite of whatever time & effort it costs me, because I think it's totes worth making my dislike of you cognitively salient to you." It can also be a show of social power.
It actually is, given that that bozo is themselves part of the community.
See phrase "rest of the community", and context clearly distinguishing them as distinct from "one bozo".
The context, as I saw it, was that I'd already used the phrase "rest of the community" to refer to everyone on LW apart from Ander, including Eugine_Nier. You used the same phrase when responding to me on that point, so I presumed you were following my usage, and simply indicating a subset of the "rest of the community" with "one bozo". Evidently I was mistaken on that point; perhaps you weren't distinguishing the phrases as clearly as you thought?
And what statements specifically are you calling an "insult"?
"It's simply dysfunctional to let yourself be controlled by the opinions of others, particularly when it's one random internet bozo who whacks your karma."
"Everyone who thinks it's perfectly functional to let yourself be driven off of participating in an internet community because some random bozo gives you a karma bombing is dysfunctional too."
I expect you'll argue that (1) isn't actually an insult since it's denigrating a behaviour rather than a person, and that (2) wasn't actually directed at me. But a little thought would give the lie to such an argument: (2) doesn't make much sense as a germane reply to me unless it's a dig at me for being "dysfunctional", and the "too" at the end of (2) shows your hand by implying that (1) was actually denigrating a person, not just a behaviour.
How many hundreds or thousands of people are on this list? If they're going to stop wanting to talk to all of them because one other guy is an asshole, they are dysfunctional.
And with that, the conversation is back where it started. I don't see the point in completing another circuit, given your sneery hyperbole and such; unless you can pull the quality of your argumentation out of its current nosedive, don't expect another reply.
Whatever. Have a nice life.
Last month I saw this post: http://lesswrong.com/lw/kbc/meta_the_decline_of_discussion_now_with_charts/ addressing whether the discussion on LessWrong was in decline. As a relatively new user who had only just started to post comments, my reaction was: “I hope that LessWrong isn’t in decline, because the sequences are amazing, and I really like this community. I should try to write a couple articles myself and post them! Maybe I could do an analysis/summary of certain sequences posts, and discuss how they had helped me to change my mind”. I started working on writing an article.
Then I logged into LessWrong and saw that my Karma value was roughly half of what it had been the day before. Previously I hadn’t really cared much about Karma, aside from whatever micro-utilons of happiness it provided to see that the number slowly grew because people generally liked my comments. Or at least, I thought I didn’t really care, until my lizard brain reflexes reacted to what it perceived as an assault on my person.
Had I posted something terrible and unpopular that had been massively downvoted during the several days since my previous login? No, in fact my ‘past 30 days’ Karma was still positive. Rather, it appeared that everything I had ever posted to LessWrong now had a -1 on it instead of a 0. Of course, my loss probably pales in comparison to that of other, more prolific posters who I have seen report this behavior.
So what controversial subject must I have commented on in order to trigger this assault? Well, let’s see, in the past week I had asked if anyone had any opinions of good software engineer interview questions I could ask a candidate. I posted in http://lesswrong.com/lw/kex/happiness_and_children/ that I was happy to not have children, and finally, here in what appears to me to be by far the most promising candidate:http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/keu/separating_the_roles_of_theory_and_direct/ I replied to a comment about global warming data, stating that I routinely saw headlines about data supporting global warming.
Here is our scenario: A new user is attempting to participate on a message board that values empiricism and rationality, posted that evidence supports that climate change is real. (Wow, really rocking the boat here!) Then, apparently in an effort to ‘win’ this discussion by silencing opposition, someone went and downvoted every comment this user had ever made on the site. Apparently they would like to see LessWrong be a bastion of empiricism and rationality and [i]climate change denial[/i] instead? And the way to achieve this is not to have a fair and rational discussion of the existing empirical data, but rather to simply Karmassassinate anyone who would oppose them?
Here is my hypothesis: The continuing problem of karma downvote stalkers is contributing to the decline of discussion on the site. I definitely feel much less motivated to try and contribute anything now, and I have been told by multiple other people at LessWrong meetings things such as “I used to post a lot on LessWrong, but then I posted X, and got mass downvoted, so now I only comment on Yvain’s blog”. These anecdotes are, of course, only very weak evidence to support my claim. I wish I could provide more, but I will have to defer to any readers who can supply more.
Perhaps this post will simply trigger more retribution, or maybe it will trigger an outswelling of support, or perhaps just be dismissed by people saying I should’ve posted it to the weekly discussion thread instead. Whatever the outcome, rather than meekly leaving LessWrong and letting my 'stalker' win, I decided to open a discussion about the issue. Thank you!