Open Thread May 2 - May 8, 2016

Elo

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

Has Eugine's mass-downvoting got more aggressive for everyone lately, or just for me? I am getting hit for 10 points or so per day; not only old comments but (I think) every comment I post, without exception.

[EDITED to add:] Of course by "everyone" I mean all Eugine's targets. Actually I don't know who else he's gunning for at the moment; perhaps it's just me.

Perhaps some of those downvotes are from other people and/or reflect actual deficiencies in what I post. But I bet the great majority are just Eugine being Eugine.

[EDITED to add:] Actually, this is interesting. At least some of my comments that are net-positive have lots of downvotes, in some cases more than seems plausible "organically". E.g., this one appears to be on +7-5; I'm not sure it really deserves +7, but I'm extremely sure it doesn't deserve -5. This one appears to be +6-5; a natural -5 seems more plausible here but still unlikely. This one is on +3-4. Some more, all mysteriously on just enough downvotes to come out negative: +1-2, +3-4, +2-3, +2-3, +2-3, +3-4, +2-3, +4-5, +3-4, +2-3, +3-4, +3-4. That's twelve consecutive comments from my overview page, all of which just happen to be on exactly -1 despite substantial numbers of votes overall.

I expect some of those downvotes are honest downvotes. But I reckon (p=0.9) Eugine has a new strategy (well done, Eugine! Such creativity!): instead of downvoting everything once, downvote everything to -1 unless you run out of sockpuppets. (And we have weak evidence that Eugine has exactly 5 downvoting sockpuppets right now.)

[EDITED again to add:] Actually, it's more like 30 points per day right now. I wonder what fraction of all upvotes and downvotes on LW in the last week have been Eugine.

[EDITED again to add:] About 45 points in the last 8 hours; my 30-day karma is now on -39 which is something like +305-344. "Normally" I think something like 5-10% of votes on my comments are downvotes, so I guess maybe 330 or so of those downvotes are Eugine's. (Current estimated time to zero karma, assuming no relevant moderator action: maybe 8 months.)

He is hitting Nancy, myself, yourself, Gleb, and possibly others. ETA: Other suspected recipients of his impotent rage: ChristianKI (low-priority target?).

All of which I find... tactically stupid. If he targeted me, well, I don't care, and nobody else would care. (And hell, I'm the one who riled him up, so it would even make something like sense.) Targeting you and Gleb is targeting bystanders; that is likely to produce administrative response.

Targeting Nancy as well, however?

I poked the tiger. It decided to try to maul the dragon in response.

12gjm10y

Remark: a policy of pushing all someone's comments down to exactly -1 is worse (for LW, whether or not for the victim) than a policy of downvoting them all n times, for specific n, because it erases information. Suppose I post a stupid comment that someone votes down to -1, and an insightful one that gets up to +4; then along comes Eugine, leaves the first alone and votes the other one down to -1. And now they look exactly the same; Eugine has removed not only the evidence of my insight in the second case, but also the evidence of my stupidity in the first. The information isn't completely gone; from any comment whose net score isn't zero and whose total number of votes isn't too large you can reconstruct the upvote and downvote numbers by looking at the "% positive" figure. But that doesn't distinguish between Eugine-downvotes and other downvotes, and e.g. the parent of this comment which is currently on (+2,56%) could be either +9-7 or +10-8. And, more to the point, "can be roughly determined by doing some calculation" is rather different from "can be seen immediately"; even in so far as the information isn't lost, it's severely obscured. The more successful Eugine is in making karma uninformative, the less grounds he has for hoping that mass-downvoting someone will ruin their reputation or drive them away. But I doubt he's thinking clearly enough or long-term enough for this to change his behaviour. ... Whether the parent of this is on +9-7 or +10-8, that's more than 5 downvotes. Either Eugine is now using more downvote-socks, or some other people dislike it. The latter hypothesis is plausible: I can easily imagine someone reading it and thinking "oh, for God's sake get this meta whining off LW". FWIW, my reasons for not shutting up about it are (1) I think it's of some anthropological interest, (2) I still have some hope that some day it will provoke the moderators into actually stopping and/or undoing Eugine's mass-downvoting, and (3) I have reason to think

13MrMind10y

My question is: why the heck are you such a dangerous person to Eugene? What point of view do you hold that Eugene deems so worthy of mass downvoting? Ironically for him, now I want to know.