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David_Gerard comments on [meta] Policy for dealing with users suspected/guilty of mass-downvote harassment? - Less Wrong Discussion
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I have one of these too. Someone is slowly working back through my comments systematically downvoting them. Given the rate, I think they're actually doing it by hand, and must have a browser window they've kept open for months just for this task. It's like they're trolling themselves for me, without me having to actually lift a finger. Some LW karma is cheap for such entertainment.
It was/is the same for me and others, too - small blocks of downvotes on old comments until they reach your first one, and then periodic block downvotes on your recent comments.
I also suspected that it is done by hand at first, but now I am leaning towards it being done with a bot/script (something adapted from reddit most likely), since it happens to many users and the pattern is quite regular over a long time.
Oh, leave me my illusions. I want to picture them FURIOUSLY DOWNVOTING ME COMMENT BY COMMENT, in UNQUENCHABLE NERD RAGE.
With your and David's karma, it seems like you must have a fair number of comments. The 4xkarma limitation on downvotes suggests that it's someone who's got a fair amount of karma (or several accounts with a fair amount of karma if you're getting multiple downvotes per comment) doing the mass downvoting. That's just weird. It's hard to imagine which high karma person on LW would engage in individual persecution like that.
One can get sufficiently high karma rather easily. We are not necessarily speaking about the "top contributor" level here.
For example, if someone gets 10 karma points in a month, which is easy if they write regularly, they have 120 karma points in a year. If they don't downvote regularly, and only decide to drop the whole bomb on one person, that's 4×120 = 480 downvotes. Even if they spend half of it on regular downvoting, and the other half on a bomb, that's still "hundreds" of downvotes.
Assuming they currently have 1 karma/post on average, which seems low to me, it would only take ~2500 karma to downvote all of David, Tenoke and falenas' comments. That isn't tiny, but for example I'm not particularly prolific and I have ~1500 karma, which I'd expect to be more than sufficient.
I have around 10,000 almost entirely from commenting on posts over three and a half years, it's not hard. I would assume someone with a long-running grudge. It's difficult to think of a worse (appropriate) punishment for them than continuing to be someone who would think this was a worthwhile way to spend their life, however.
We've traced the call, and it turns out it was Eliezer Yudkowsky the whole time!
Interesting. I didn't know about the x4 limitation. As that puts a natural limit on the downvoting I do not see any problem in principle with the 'mass' downvoting. If you do not have the freedom to actually spend your karma on (mass) downvotes, then the problem is not the downvoting but the limit.
The limit ensures that you downvotes need to be compensated by correspondingly valued contributions. If more people exercised their downvoting share this 'mass downvoting' wouldn't even have been noticable.
The problem may be that it is applied to individuals. But even though that can be perceived as unfair it is still strictly the choice available to the voter (not much different that voting on the popularity of people instead of comments which is seldom nowadays instead of in popularity (up)votes.
My proposal would be to either a) reduce the limit to x2 or b) change the limit to x1 ''per person'' (if that is possible easily).
This is conditional on attackers not artificially accumulating karma by upvoting themselves (via multiple accounts). Such self-voting can in principle be either detected or prevented by network flow algorithms like Advogato's ( http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html ) but that requires significant changes to the karma logic.
Note: I'm not afiliated with Advogato but I'd really like to see the basic principle (the network flow) be applied more to voting algorithms in general.
I tend to think of downvoting as a mechanism to signal and filter low-quality content rather than as a mechanism to 'spend karma' on some goal or another. It seems that mass downvoting doesn't really fit the goal of filtering content -- it just lets you know that someone is either trolling LW in general, or just really doesn't like someone in a way that they aren't articulating in a PM or response to a comment/article.