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Kawoomba comments on [meta] Policy for dealing with users suspected/guilty of mass-downvote harassment? - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm not going to call out specific users here.
You know, privacy concerns, a strong preference against public shaming, and all that.
s/example/hypothetical/
To suggest that a user whose comments you'd find both ubiquitous and worthless would also be so judged by a moderator "examining the case" seems like folly to me. Do you by extension suggest that people always vote the exact same, too? When you downvote a comment, would you expect everyone else to also downvote that comment, because the downvote would be "obvious"? Why would it be different with a moderator.
Such things are evidently subjective. There is a difference between using your own voting to convey a message, and bringing in some authority figure to "examine the case". All these courses of action are not equal.
I'm sure you can imagine comments that you yourself find interesting, while others find worthless. I myself have written many such comments, little puns in particular. Just imagine a long string of them. There you go.
If a user's history is controversial (both upvoted and downvoted) versus only downvoted, then punishing you for downvoting all (90%+) of their comments (if they have more than a few) is completely justified.
At any rate, here is an extra filter to prevent false positives even further - if you look at the comments where only the offender has downvoted and you see neutral comments (those which would have neither been downvoted nor upvoted normally) there, then you know there is a problem.
Can I ask for some reasoning underlying this? In particular, I'm interested in what, in general, justifies punishment and who gets to decide whom to punish for what.
There is a discussion on this exact topic here.
I see no discussion on what justifies punishment, I see people saying "I would punish the guy", "I would not punish the guy". And the issue on who gets to decide is mostly absent, too, there is only that faceless "we".
You're missing the point, you can downvote a comment because you want to see fewer such comments. There is no reason -- absent rules -- that couldn't extend to all of a poster's comments if you want to see fewer comments by that person. There are benefits to sending clear signals. This isn't some official process -- it's simply an expression of your personal preferences, not anyone else's. Your "offender" and "punishment" fixation when conflating "I don't like this behavior" with "this behavior must be punished" is a bit frustrating, given we have rules on a host of issues, but no rule yet on this one. It's simply using your own karma.
Anyways, I'm signing off on this.
You're missing the point that we are not talking about downvotes of specific comments, but downvotes of most comments by an user.
The only time I tried this I quickly gave up, because the poster I didn't want to see used the monthly quotes threads to karma boost. A malicious user that's intelligent can pretty much troll however they want and still have positive karma simply by copy/pasting quotes into the the quote threads.
This doesn't really apply to the topic at hand, but the quote threads are a serious karma problem, because they provide an effort-free way to generate huge amounts of karma.
Yeah, I'm arguing against that mindset as a whole. I'd much rather people only downvote the content they disagree with, and to leave the other comments alone.
Anyway, so you think that it is fine, if for example I got annoyed at you during this discussion and went and downvoted all your unrelated to this comments in order to see fewer comments by you in the future?
I wouldn't like it, but there is a difference (a rather large one) between not liking it and thinking that person should be punished for it.
I'm not in control of his/her downvote button, he/she is. This topic has come up many times, and yet no consensus has ever been reached. And it wasn't only because of technical problems, either. Your preferences are your own, just leave me out of them, in a nutshell. (I did sign off on this, but didn't want to leave your question unanswered. Stupid red letter symbol!)