I don't think I need to be polite when I'm having everything I write be downvoted and "argued" against by about twelve different people.

Neither of these gives a licence for rudeness. Having a variety of people argue against a position is not a reason that defense of that position should be less polite. As to downvoting- you yourself said that people should care less about downvoting, so maybe do so?

In general, you need to think carefully about what your goals are. If your goals are to convince people then being polite helps. If your goal is to convince bystanders of your position or something similar then being polite still helps, because people are more inclined to take a position seriously when the one arguing for it is calm and polite. At a completely selfish level, being rude makes it harder to accept that one is wrong, due to cognitive dissonance issues and invested-effort/sunk cost issues. So if one wants to become less wrong one should try to be polite for purely selfish reasons.

I don't think I need to be polite when I'm having everything I write be downvoted and "argued" against by about twelve different people.

Consider the case where some mugger is pointing a gun at you. That should help give you a more practical perspective. Sure, the mugger doesn't deserve politeness. It isn't fair that politeness is necessary. But you still need to be polite to him if you wish to minimize the chance that he will shoot you in the head.

Sometimes other people really do behaving like dicks and be unreasonable or unfair. Yet that doesn't mean you are obliged to sabotage yourself to get petty vengeance. You are free to follow whatever course of actions get you the best outcome. So what if that course happens to involve typing words that will cause other people to believe you are being polite to them? What matters is whether you get what you want in the end.

there's no reason I would want to be polite with people who see no problem being rude to me.

Then expect to be downvoted - anyone else being rude to you will be downvoted as well (not necessarily on net).

By "groupthink" I mean that people are disagreeing with me simply because other people are disagreeing with me and because I already have negative karma. I also mean that they aren't considering my arguments fairly, they're only looking at the issue from a one sided perspectively. I'm pretty sure that this is a standard interpretation of what "groupthink" means.

Leaving aside the common "people are disagreeing with me" interpretation, I still don't think that's what people (non-technically) mean when they use the word "groupthink". "Groupthink" (in the popular usage) implies that there are beliefs common to the group that are not questioned - for example, accusing Less Wrong of "groupthink" because a comment against cryonics was highly criticized would be the common usage.

Really, it should not be used that way either though, since it's too similar to the technical meaning of the term but entirely wrong.

You're playing with semantics and taking quotes literally. ... You're willfully being confused here.

No, I was not confused about what you meant - I was pointing out how it was not obvious. If you say "Obviously X" and I think X is also obvious to me, then I still might have grounds for arguing that X is not obvious in general. In fact, unless you're talking about something like the color of an object that a particular group of people are currently staring at, it's best to assume that nothing is obvious. If you do use the word "obvious", you should expect objections from people who did not find it obvious, and expect some of them to feel that you are insulting their intelligence.

I do not see how I was playing with semantics. Yes, I take what you write literally. If you do not want me to read the words that you write, then do not write them on this website, as I will probably get around to reading all of them eventually.

Nothing that you said here is relevant to what I was contending.

Usually, "if my comment was wrong" refers to its factual accuracy, not the quality of your reasoning. So following an accusation of overconfidence with "that would only make sense if my comment was wrong" is misleading.

It is easier to reject a viewpoint if other people do not find that viewpoint credible....

I'm familiar with that effect, but I don't see how it's a response to either of my statements.

No, I started receiving lots of bad karma after a post I made in the earlier thread, and that trend spread to here.

Well I, for one, did not read or downvote anything you said in that other thread until I read this one. Now I've gone back and downvoted all the low-quality comments you made in that thread (note: that is not all of your comments).

there are people going around downvoting everything I write simply because I am the one who wrote it. That is stupid.

There are more constructive things to call that behavior other than "stupid". And I'd like to know how you know that's what people are doing - I have no tools that let me detect that, and looking back at your comment history you have some recent comments that are not at a net negative.

At this point I wouldn't be surprised if there existed at least one person who did follow chaosmosis around to downvote everything he said. I strongly disapprove of this being done, but it's the inevitable conclusion when someone chooses to spew insults on other people en masse.

Really doesn't seem worth it. He's just a Mostly Harmless kid who is bungling his way through learning how power works. There isn't much harm he could do even if he tried. I focus my specific moderating attention on cases that do real damage to serious conversations (which usually means straw man power user debaters.)

FWIW, when I see someone making really bad comments, I tend to look at their other comments to see if they're also downvote-worthy, since it's a source of low-hanging fruit for moderation.

This has been happening for a while, and there's more than one person.

This is what motivated the insults in the first place, you've got the chain of causality backwards.

It's sufficient for more people to start paying attention to a particular user's output, without changing the attitude to individual comments in any way.

Oh, I see your argument now (not that I think it's decisive enough to make you interpretation "clearly" the correct one, but, you know, whatever) - notice though that there was no way I could have guessed it from the great^3-grandparent. I would have said that's why you were downvoted initially, but looking through your comment history it's quite possible there is someone automatically downvoting your comments regardless of content, in which case I really don't know what to tell you. Sorry about that.

I honestly didn't know about the posting delay, but I personally wouldn't assign a lot utility to it. And even less (close to none) to the ability to downvote others. In this case I think a 10 minute delay might help if it is used to check for illusion of transparency and/or lacking steps in his chain of reasoning.

But overall, thank you for pointing out the negative consequences of low karma. I'm reading up on it and I must admit I haven't found the right post (read the faq) to cover all the consequences. Still they seem minor at best.