gwern comments on [moderator action] Eugine_Nier is now banned for mass downvote harassment - Less Wrong

107 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 03 July 2014 12:04PM

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Comment author: ialdabaoth 03 July 2014 03:14:28PM 3 points [-]

True, but in my experience, Eugine's primary karma engine was karma-mining the Rationalist Quotes page; someone could simply commit to ONLY posting there, and build a pretty substantial resource pool rather quickly.

Comment author: gwern 03 July 2014 04:39:32PM 27 points [-]

Eugine's primary karma engine was karma-mining the Rationalist Quotes page

Nah. The quotes make up <1/5th of his top-ranked comments, and you can see for yourself: load http://www.ibiblio.org/weidai/lesswrong_user.php?u=Eugine_Nier , wait for it to fetch all his comments, "sort by: points", "hide parents", copy-paste down to, say, his comments with +9 karma, and then look at the composition:

$ xclip -o | fgrep -e 'In response to' | fgrep -i -e 'quote' | wc --lines
20
$ xclip -o | fgrep -e 'In response to' | wc --lines
108

Of his comments ranked >= 9 points, 20/108 or <1/5 were on rationality quote pages. I suppose he could be getting much more karma from masses of lower-ranked comments on quotes pages, but that seems a bit unlikely and more work than I want to do at the moment.

Comment author: 9eB1 03 July 2014 06:54:29PM 12 points [-]

Even a casual inspection of his comments page will reveal that he posted a lot in threads other than quote threads, that his comments were of reasonably good quality, and that they were frequently upvoted (and occasionally downvoted). I don't think there could be any system that would have stopped him from mass downvoting people by manipulating what counts for karma, as he was basically a contributing member of comment society.

Comment author: gwern 03 July 2014 07:13:21PM 8 points [-]

He did have a lot of good comments, but he also had a lot of very negative comments. Hypothetically a system could look for people with a very wide range of scores and flag them for deeper inspection.

Comment author: ialdabaoth 03 July 2014 04:53:29PM 21 points [-]

gwern: Testing our hypotheses since 2009.

Thanks for the info; I was not expecting the data to show that. It does indicate that the problem will be smaller than I feared.

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