Eugine expressed that he found certain people MoreWrong.
And the proper way to expose the fallacies in someone's opinions is downvoting all their comments, both those that contain the fallacies, and those that don't? Even including, if I remember correctly, meetup announcements?
And if perchance I disagree with Eugine's opinion about a user X, the proper way to express my disagreement would be to upvote all their comments, both those smart and those not smart; because otherwise my vote has smaller value than Eugine's? And then if we all adopt this norm, we will keep upvoting and downvoting comments according to the users' popularity, regardless of the merits of specific comments? Why not simplify the whole system and upvote and downvote users directly? -- Do you have the same political opinion as I do? Upvoted. The opposite opinion? Downvoted. Certainly there is a lesson somewhere about how this would lead to increased rationality.
You know, in the political debates I often had a similar position like Eugine. But I didn't mass-downvote my opponents, and as far as I know, none of them mass-downvoted me. Something like implicit cooperation in a prisonners' dilemma. Which allowed the debates to be much more civilized than most of the internet. Which I enjoyed. I partially blame Eugine for destroying this possibility of having civilized political debates on LW. It's hard to have a respectful debate, when one of participants is systematically downvoted regardless of whether they made a smart or stupid comment, whether they made a fallacy or exposed their opponent's fallacy. How are people supposed to learn and change their minds in such a debate? Isn't that one of the purposes of Less Wrong?
In the past I have explicitly objected against trying to bring new members based on their political opinion, to create a "balance". But removing new members based on their political opinion, that's even worse. At least the former contributes to the growth of the community, and there is a chance that those people might changed their opinions when exposed to intelligent arguments against. The latter just promotes one view; and if someone would update in the wrong direction, well, they might suddenly find their karma disappearing miraculously.
But he hasn't really been shunned in turn, because people don't seem to have the stomach for it. He's been banished through technical means, and had his "anonymous" karma votes similarly exposed through technical means. Instead of shunning, power was used against him because people said they felt bad from being downvoted.
Which I believe is a great thing! Eugine's actions did not start an arms race of mutual mass-downvoting. Not even on a website where many people have the ability to write a script for doing it, so such warfare wouldn't cost them too much energy. (For example, I probably would be able to writte one. I have previously used Perl scripts to scrape content from some websites; maybe it would be relatively easy to customize them for LW. I didn't try.)
Is that the kind of list you'd like, people complain about their hurt feelings from someone else's evaluation of them, and he's banished? Think you never "make" people feel bad?
Here you use too general terms. There are many ways to make people "feel bad"; but we are talking specifically about mass-downvoting here. People were making each other feel bad by posting comments the other side didn't agree with, politically, pretty often. No one was ever banned for that.
Call him out for being an ass, if you think he was one. Great.
We had a few threads complaining about the mass-downvoting (although the identity of the downvoter wasn't confirmed then), so it kinda happened.
Seems to me that there are some very different cultures here on the list. We can cut each other some slack, or we can fight for control of that kill switch.
Just to be sure how deep is the cultural difference: does mass-downvoting of new users belong to the "cut each other some slack" category? Should we aim for a balance of "I will mass-downvote the new users who seem to be on your side, and in turn you can mass-downvote the new users who seem to be on my side, and perhaps we can try destroying each other by downvoting scripts, but no one will call the moderator to intervene"?
As previously discussed, on June 6th I received a message from jackk, a Trike Admin. He reported that the user Jiro had asked Trike to carry out an investigation to the retributive downvoting that Jiro had been subjected to. The investigation revealed that the user Eugine_Nier had downvoted over half of Jiro's comments, amounting to hundreds of downvotes.
I asked the community's guidance on dealing with the issue, and while the matter was being discussed, I also reviewed previous discussions about mass downvoting and looked for other people who mentioned being the victims of it. I asked Jack to compile reports on several other users who mentioned having been mass-downvoted, and it turned out that Eugine was also overwhelmingly the biggest downvoter of users David_Gerard, daenarys, falenas108, ialdabaoth, shminux, and Tenoke. As this discussion was going on, it turned out that user Ander had also been targeted by Eugine.
I sent two messages to Eugine, requesting an explanation. I received a response today. Eugine admitted his guilt, expressing the opinion that LW's karma system was failing to carry out its purpose of keeping out weak material and that he was engaged in a "weeding" of users who he did not think displayed sufficient rationality.
Needless to say, it is not the place of individual users to unilaterally decide that someone else should be "weeded" out of the community. The Less Wrong content deletion policy contains this clause:
Although the wording does not explicitly mention downvoting, harassment by downvoting is still harassment. Several users have indicated that they have experienced considerable emotional anguish from the harassment, and have in some cases been discouraged from using Less Wrong at all. This is not a desirable state of affairs, to say the least.
I was originally given my moderator powers on a rather ad-hoc basis, with someone awarding mod privileges to the ten users with the highest karma at the time. The original purpose for that appointment was just to delete spam. Nonetheless, since retributive downvoting has been a clear problem for the community, I asked the community for guidance on dealing with the issue. The rough consensus of the responses seemed to authorize me to deal with the problem as I deemed appropriate.
The fact that Eugine remained quiet about his guilt until directly confronted with the evidence, despite several public discussions of the issue, is indicative of him realizing that he was breaking prevailing social norms. Eugine's actions have worsened the atmosphere of this site, and that atmosphere will remain troubled for as long as he is allowed to remain here.
Therefore, I now announce that Eugine_Nier is permanently banned from posting on LessWrong. This decision is final and will not be changed in response to possible follow-up objections.
Unfortunately, it looks like while a ban prevents posting, it does not actually block a user from casting votes. I have asked jackk to look into the matter and find a way to actually stop the downvoting. Jack indicated earlier on that it would be technically straightforward to apply a negative karma modifier to Eugine's account, and wiping out Eugine's karma balance would prevent him from casting future downvotes. Whatever the easiest solution is, it will be applied as soon as possible.
EDIT 24 July 2014: Banned users are now prohibited from voting.