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:
Harrassment of individual users.
If we determine that you're e.g. following a particular user around and leaving insulting comments to them, we reserve the right to delete those comments. (This has happened extremely rarely.)
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.
Let me explain my background. I grew up in a socialist country. Luckily, no one from my family or friends was a target of the regime, and it ended when I was 13. Only then I learned about what happened to other people. (You know, stuff like: secret police knocks on your door at midnight, they take your family member away, and you never seem them again. Later someone unofficially tells you they died during interrogation. They warn you that unless you shut up, you could be next. Also, you, your children, and your grandchildren will never be allowed to get to university or have a decent job, because you are relatives of a traitor, therefore politically unreliable. The regime hates you, but you are not allowed to leave the country, and will be killed if you try.) There was censorship to prevent me from learning sooner. I believed I was living in a happy paradise. Many people believe it today. (Many people also believe holocaust was a hoax, for similar psychological reasons.)
I remember a teacher at elementary school telling me: "Viliam, you think independently. You will have a lot of problems when you grow up." I didn't quite understand that, then. Now I do. So I guess I was lucky. Even my childhood experience with what you can and cannot say would be enough to predict that if someone in my country would write the Sequences, they would be inviting trouble. It's difficult to explain why exactly; my neural network understands the rules, but they were never made explicit. It's something like: merely saying "politics is the mind-killed" could be, under unlucky circumstances, be perceived as a criticism of the regime. You never say things that could be perceived as a criticism of the regime, because then you could have hard time explaining that you didn't mean it that way.
The way I see it, the main difference between nazis and socialists is this: Nazis lost the war; their leaders were killed or put in prisons, their crimes publicly exposed and shamed. Socialists won the war, they were allowed to rule for decades, to eliminate free speech and spread their propaganda. After they killed and intimidated everyone who opposed them, and their rule was secured, they calmed down, and life under their rule became more peaceful during the following decades. Who knows; maybe in the parallel universe where nazis won the war, the nazis of 1980s were also less violent than the nazis of 1840s. (Maybe neoreactionaries are the moderate post-nazis from the parallel universe, where some later Führer hired Steve Jobs as the CEO.)
Anyway... the thing is, censorship "triggers" me. Censorship is the meta-evil that other evils can safely hide behind. Speaking about whether we need more or less censorship sounds like speaking about whether we need more or less secret police knocking on people's doors at midnight. (Yeah, I can imagine a very exceptional situation, such as someone really constructing a nuclear bomb at their home... but that's far from the typical scenario.) Censoring the bourgeois pseudoscience? Uhm, I'd rather have scientific questions answered by scientific means.
I generally try not to write off-topic comments. I consider exposing crimes of socialists highly relevant to the topic of censorship, because censorship was a critically important part of their regime; without censorship, it would fall apart. So the best way to keep me quiet about this topic is to stop proposing censorship on LW. Do we have a deal?
Thank you for taking the time to write all that, it helps me see where you are coming from. You clearly have a large framework which you are basing your views on, but the thing you have to keep in mind is that I do, too. I have several partially-written posts about this which I hope to post on Less Wrong one day, but I’m very worried they’ll be misconstrued because it’s such a difficult subject. The last thing I want to do is defend the practices of oppressive regimes, believe me. I’m worried that people just read my posts thinking “oh he is defending cens... (read more)