Comment on Open Thread May 2 - May 8, 2016

Wed, 04 May 2016 14:19:52 GMT

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 that unfortunately Eugine's behaviour has been instrumental in driving a bunch of people away from LW and hope that keeping it visible will make it less effective and therefore less likely to push people away. And, I confess, (4) I hope to mitigate any reputational effect his attacks might have on me by reminding readers that if it weren't for Eugine's vendetta my 30-day karma would be somewhere around +220 rather than +12 :-). Anyway, if anyone reading this has strong opinions about whether I should shut up about this stuff, I'd be interested to know them.

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