[meta] Policy for dealing with users suspected/guilty of mass-downvote harassment?

Kaj_Sotala

Below is a message I just got from jackk. Some specifics have been redacted 1) so that we can discuss general policy rather than the details of this specific case 2) because presumption of innocence, just in case there happens to be an innocuous explanation to this.

Hi Kaj_Sotala,

I'm Jack, one of the Trike devs. I'm messaging you because you're the moderator who commented most recently. A while back the user [REDACTED 1] asked if Trike could look into retributive downvoting against his account. I've done that, and it looks like [REDACTED 2] has downvoted at least [over half of REDACTED 1's comments, amounting to hundreds of downvotes] ([REDACTED 1]'s next-largest downvoter is [REDACTED 3] at -15).

What action to take is a community problem, not a technical one, so we'd rather leave that up to the moderators. Some options:

1. Ask [REDACTED 2] for the story behind these votes
2. Use the "admin" account (which exists for sending scripted messages, &c.) to apply an upvote to each downvoted post
3. Apply a karma award to [REDACTED 1]'s account. This would fix the karma damage but not the sorting of individual comments
4. Apply a negative karma award to [REDACTED 2]'s account. This makes him pay for false downvotes twice over. This isn't possible in the current code, but it's an easy fix
5. Ban [REDACTED 2]

For future reference, it's very easy for Trike to look at who downvoted someone's account, so if you get questions about downvoting in the future I can run the same report.

If you need to verify my identity before you take action, let me know and we'll work something out.

-- Jack

So... thoughts? I have mod powers, but when I was granted them I was basically just told to use them to fight spam; there was never any discussion of any other policy, and I don't feel like I have the authority to decide on the suitable course of action without consulting the rest of the community.

Hi Kaj_Sotala,

I'm Jack, one of the Trike devs. I'm messaging you because you're the moderator who commented most recently. A while back the user [REDACTED 1] asked if Trike could look into retributive downvoting against his account. I've done that, and it looks like [REDACTED 2] has downvoted at least [over half of REDACTED 1's comments, amounting to hundreds of downvotes] ([REDACTED 1]'s next-largest downvoter is [REDACTED 3] at -15).

What action to take is a community problem, not a technical one, so we'd rather leave that up to the moderators. Some options:

1. Ask [REDACTED 2] for the story behind these votes
2. Use the "admin" account (which exists for sending scripted messages, &c.) to apply an upvote to each downvoted post
3. Apply a karma award to [REDACTED 1]'s account. This would fix the karma damage but not the sorting of individual comments
4. Apply a negative karma award to [REDACTED 2]'s account. This makes him pay for false downvotes twice over. This isn't possible in the current code, but it's an easy fix
5. Ban [REDACTED 2]

For future reference, it's very easy for Trike to look at who downvoted someone's account, so if you get questions about downvoting in the future I can run the same report.

If you need to verify my identity before you take action, let me know and we'll work something out.

-- Jack

Got a source?

Not really. This is my own lived experience comparing Usenet to Google Groups, Reddit, web forums, and Wikipedia, and noting the explosion of user-contribution in the shift from Overcoming Bias to LessWrong. You could easily prove Usenet is declined, but I'm not sure what research you could do to prove that the incentives were structured wrong or that features like killfiles fostered complacency & reluctance to change, other than to note how all of Usenet's replacements were strikingly different from it in similar ways.

I don't think killfiles were a significant factor myself, but I admit I'm basing that opinion just on "it sounds wrong", not any actual data.

My read is that killfiles were a major aspect of systematically bad design of Usenet which made it uncompetitive and unscalable: it increased user costs it should not have, adding friction and trivial inconveniences. Killfiles express a fundamental contempt for user time: if there are 100 readers and 1 spammer, it should not take 100 reader actions to deal with the 1 spammers, as killfiles inherently tilt matters. What would be much better is if 10 readers take an action like downvoting and spare the remaining 90. Rinse and repeat. What is better, dealing with spam/trolls while using O(1) or O(n) in reader time?

I'd have attributed the decline of Usenet and mailing lists to (1) not being on the Web (that's the biggie) (2) barrier to entry to create a new discussion forum (even alt.* had process). Mostly (1) - the wine-users list (for Wine, the Windows compatibility layer for Linux) has a two-way gateway to a web forum, and immediately the forum was available the volume was 10x.

The non-Web thing is another example of this. Yes, an uber-nerd (and buybuydandavis is exemplifying this attitude in this thread) may contemptuously look at it as an irrelevant problem: 'what sort of person can't maintain a good killfile? or figure out how to deal with NNTP servers and ports and local clients?' But it's a big deal when repeatedly incurred by millions of people who do not wish to become uber-nerds and to whom costs matter.

Of course, all of this could have been fixed. But they weren't fixed in time, and so Usenet stagnated and died.

As I recall, at least the parts of usenet where I hung out (rec.art.sf.written, fandom, and composition, and soc.support.fat-acceptance) weren't that badly plagued by spam (there were volunteers dealing with spam for usenet), but trolls were a problem.

18Richard_Kennaway12y

Another experience here from a long-time former user of Usenet, overlapping yours to some extent. comp.sources.* was made obsolete by the web and cheap disc space. The binaries newsgroups also, except for legally questionable content that no-one wanted the exposure of personally hosting. (I understand the binaries groups still play this role to some extent.) I dropped sci.logic and sci.math years before I dropped Usenet altogether, and for the same reason that if I was looking today for discussion on such topics, I wouldn't look there. There's only so long you can go on skipping past the same old arguments over whether 0.999... equals 1. rec.arts.sf.* took a big hit when LiveJournal was invented. Many of its prominent posters left to start their own blogs. Rasf carried on for years after that, but it never really recovered to its earlier level, and slowly dwindled year by year. Some rasf stalwarts mocked those who left, accusing them of wanting their own little fiefdom where they could censor opposing viewpoints. They spoke as if this was a Bad Thing. It's certainly a different thing from Usenet, but if you want a place on the net for pleasant conversation among friends, a blog under your own control is the way to have that. Rasf was that, for many of its members, for many years, but blogs do it better. Usenet was never designed, it just grew. There were various bodies and people involved with managing it, but they generally played King Log, leaving it up to the users to manage the creation of newsgroups and stamping the resulting consensus. Kill files didn't come from a design team, they were invented one day by Larry Wall), and taken up by everyone because they saw what a brilliant idea it was. That everyone had to manage their own kill file was, from the point of view of what Usenet was, a virtue, not a flaw. Everyone could speak, no matter what they had to say, but no-one had to listen. The libertarian ideal of free speech. I say this not particularly to def

0PhilGoetz12y

I think it has more to do with the fact that Overcoming Bias didn't allow users to post.

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[meta] Policy for dealing with users suspected/guilty of mass-downvote harassment?

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[meta] Policy for dealing with users suspected/guilty of mass-downvote harassment?

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