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OrphanWilde comments on Upcoming LW Changes - Less Wrong
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Comments (105)
This is simply untrue.
What gets called "retributive voting" is when you vote something down not because of its own (de)merits but because of its author. That's bad for LW no matter who does it. Someone who does it much is (I suggest) ipso facto not a good guy any more.
I have never seen anyone defending such behaviour as "karma system working as intended", so I'm not seeing the hypocrisy you complain of. Can you point to a couple of examples?
(It's also an abuse of the karma system if you systematically vote someone's comments up because you approve of that person. I've no idea whether that's a thing that happens -- aside from the case where the voter and the beneficiary are really the same person, which is an abuse of the system for other reasons -- because it's harder to notice: most people's karma, most of the time, goes up rather than down, and the main way retributive downvoting gets spotted is when someone notices that they've suddenly lost a lot of karma.)
Actually, let's take this in another direction: Suppose the moderator(s) (Is Nancy the only one left) are out on vacation, and Eugine shows up again, and has already farmed enough karma to begin downvoting.
Would it be a Good Guy act, or a Bad Guy act, to downvote all of his karma-farming comments?
I'm not keen on this sort of binary classification. But: I don't think I would do it in most versions of this scenario, though I dare say some other reasonable people would.
What's interesting to me about your choice of scenario is that it's one in which an "identity-based" sanction has already been applied: Eugine, specifically, is not supposed to be active here any more. It would not be so very surprising if that provided an exception to the general principle that voting should be content-based rather than identity-based.