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gwern comments on [moderator action] Eugine_Nier is now banned for mass downvote harassment - Less Wrong
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Not really a problem. To gain a lot of downvote power, short of creating a bunch of circle-upvote socks, you'd need to comment or write a lot, and longtime commenters like Eugine are generally easy to spot: everyone has idiosyncratic ideas, ways of phrasing things, writing styles, references and calculations... (without even getting into stylometrics). For example, if I were banned today and surfaced under another sock a month from now, I'd be spotted quickly - just look for the new account that uses lots of hyphens, semicolons, lists, quotations and paraphrases, etc in discussing topics like statistical & experimental methodology. Similarly, Eugine has a lot of idiosyncratic interests (global warming, the fall of the west, conservative family values and so on).
This is the same reason the worst special-interest trolls on Wikipedia didn't benefit much from socking: they had too clear a fingerprint in their arguments and writings.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.