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[moderator action] Eugine_Nier is now banned for mass downvote harassment
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.
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Comments (366)
Upvoted because moderation is hard and I get the impression it's more responsibility than you thought you were signing up for.
Especially since I never actually even signed up for it - I was just told one day that "hey, you're a mod now". :-)
Ouch. Well, I'm not sure you can say that anymore. I don't envy you your new position as Garden Keeper.
That increases my trust in you.
Huh. So I WASN'T paranoid.
That's actually a good feeling.
I don't feel even a little surprised - the one contrary hypothesis that seemed worth considering was someone personally close to, or weirdly obsessed with, Eugine Nier. But yes, this is good news.
Well, the last time I brought it up, there was quite a bit of controversy about whether I was imagining things... so I somehow feel vindicated. (But not TOO vindicated - it's important to note let those probabilities peg to 0 or 1)
I didn't really approve of this when you posted it, but for what it's worth I just upvoted it as a correct prediction.
Thank you, Kaj_Sotala, for taking decisive action in the face of social awkwardness.
I'm sad to see Eugine_Nier go, but it sounds like a win overall.
I seem to be the lone dissenter here, but I am unhappy about the ban. Not that it is unjustified, it definitely is. However, it does not address the main issue (until jackk fiddles with karma): preventing Eugine from mass downvoting. So this is mainly retribution, rather than remediation, which seems anti-rational to me, if emotionally satisfying, as one of the victims.
Imagine for a moment that Eugine did not engage in mass downvoting. He would be a valuable regular on this site. I recall dozens of insightful comments he made (and dozens of poor ones, of course, but who am I to point fingers), and I only stopped engaging him in the comments after his mass-downvoting habits were brought to light for the first time. So, I would rather see him exposed and dekarmified, but allowed to participate.
TL;DR: banning is a wrong decision, should have been exposed and stripped of the ability of downvote instead. Optionally, all his votes ever could have been reversed, unless it's hard.
EDIT: apparently not the lone dissenter, just the first to speak up.
This should be considered as a possibly better solution. People who can't be trusted with algorithmic control of visibility of others' posts may still have worthwhile posts of their own to contribute.
That said, I'm not sure I can wholeheartedly endorse it. Well-kept gardens die by pacifism. A person who has demonstrated active hostility toward others in the community perhaps shouldn't be regarded as a good-faith contributor. Kaj has construed this as a harassment problem rather than a bad data problem — it's not that Eugine was feeding erroneous data into a ranking algorithm whose output we care about; it's that he was (admittedly) trying to drive people off the site whom he didn't approve of.
Right. And it seems like a non-central application of the harassment clause. As a result, he applied the measures standard for a harassment, which are not the best ones in this situation.
Part of the problem is that the cited policy is phrased as a nonbinding "deletion policy" (a discussion of cases when moderators might delete posts or comments) and not a "conduct policy" (discussing acceptable use of the site in general). The closest we seem to have to the latter is the "Site Etiquette and Social Norms" section of the FAQ, which does discuss some unacceptable uses of the voting mechanism but does not contemplate that someone might go so far as to use it to intentionally drive users off the site. That may not be a failure of imagination — it may be an avoidance of the "Don't stuff beans up your nose!" problem. Spelling out lots of ways to abuse the system provides a malicious or mischievous user with a list of things to do.
In any event, it's a bad idea to cooperate with a defectbot.
Retribution can serve as deterrence.
Yep, suboptimal in many cases but often better than nothing.
Wrong comparison. I was not proposing doing nothing. Making the culprit's name public should have been the first step.
In this case, many people had already expressed strong confidence that Eugine was a major source of mass downvoting- some we're quite certain of that and said so publicly. So it doesn't look like that matters.
I'm also unhappy with him being banned from commenting but not downvoting. While I frequently found his comments obnoxious and annoying in their connotations, they definitely served a net positive on the site.
That said, his moderation practices clearly served a larger net negative, so if there are technical reasons why it's difficult to undo his moderation and ban him from moderating in the future, I suppose this is the best we can get.
I think the end goal is to stop him from down-voting as well as commenting as mentioned in the last sentence of the post.
I'm glad this was done, if only to send a signal to the community that something is being done, but you have a point that this is not an ideal solution and I hope a better one is implemented soon.
The ban made me uncomfortable, and the talk of Eugine as being "guilty" makes me even more uncomfortable. My take:
Perfect is the enemy of the good. If we expect massive downvoting to be a recurring problem, then maybe it would have been worth waiting until the development of non-voting accounts or dekarmification mechanisms. As an ad hoc solution to the problem du jour, banning a user is fine.
I guess the question is whether someone who took action by themselves to mass down vote for the express purpose of removing other users from the site would stop simply because his primary method was removed.
If I were doing the down-voting, and was then de-karmified, it would be the next logical step to find another way around the system such that I could continue my actions without the use of karma.
Hopefully, preventing him from commenting will mean that he begins to be less personally invested in the comment threads on the site, and thus more likely to spend his time doing other stuff instead of downvoting comments.
Yup, I endorse this. (Pretty sure I've been one of Eugine Nier's targets at one time or another.) I am wary of silencing those who don't share my politics (even if they stink up the joint with links to Vox Day).
If it were technically feasible, I'd say let him keep the karma score, just throttle or cut off his downvote button.
That said, I also endorse this:
And this:
I am also a lone dissenter who is unhappy about the ban.
Why not just ban him from further karma voting? Why ban him from posting? His posts and comments were good enough to get him plenty of karma which was required for him to even mass downvote other people in the first place.
As the topic seems to imply: they don't actually seem to have a way to keep him from using his karma.
They are quite capable of removing all his karma, or even setting it very negative, which would remove his ability to downvote. To the extent there are technical problems, they could give him a temporary ban while these are worked out.
Perma-ban is a deliberate choice by the moderator(s), not something they were forced into.
By the way, what are the consequences of low karma? Not being able to downvote, not being able to post articles... anything else?
Hi. I don't care about karma very much (and thus about downvoting). I am ok with my comments standing on merits not on numbers, and people using my name rather than a number as a quality shortcut if they really want one.
I am perfectly happy to see that dude "not here," just based on the type of dude he is (not even based on his ideas). These types of dudes will ruin a community in a hurry, both by attracting more like themselves, and encouraging the more reasonable to leave. This is why I kept saying he needs to find another place on the internet to debate his politics.
I have zero (0) problems with virtue ethical banning.
As long as we're giving opinions on that: While many of his comments were interesting in an idiosyncratic, contrarian sort of way, I can't claim I've ever actually gained any insight from any of his comments.
I agree that the ban won't help, though - what has happened is just a natural consequence of people upvoting "interesting" instead of "rationality-improving" (which, paradoxically seems to have created userbase shifts which cause things to ultimately be less interesting)
I've wondered about what those who liked about Nier's contributions liked about them. Was he doing decent work on the technical topics I don't follow?
A decent fraction of his posts hard hitting and solid, usually saying something in a way that clearly and effectively got the point across. However, a much larger fraction of his posts were one-liner quips and thinly disguised political screeds. I ended up downvoting more than upvoting, but I did upvote.
To be honest, I think people enjoyed his style more than his substance.
The core lesswrong community (at least, back when I was more active) don't downvote to disagree. They upvote when something is thought provoking (as contrarian politics tends to be), they upvote novelty (again, contrarian politics) and they are more tolerant of critical tones than other parts of the net.
So even though there wasn't much true insight and most people disagree with most of his opinions, it was interesting enough to read. I know I really enjoyed the influx of reactionaries for the first few months because it was a new and exciting thing...but then it kind of got tiresome - especially when reactionary voices started dominating completely unrelated conversations and influencing votes completely out of proportion to the number of members who actually held those views. Somehow, the reactionary users we had were also among the most active users, and naturally, they liked talking about politics.
(Please note: While I did not explicitly say it, the above implies by connotation that Nier and his unethical practices are reflective of reactionaries in general. This is unintentional. What I AM saying is that the reason Neir was upvoted is the same reason that reactionaries were upvoted, and the things I disliked about Nier's writings is the same thing that I dislike about many but certainly not all of the reactionary user's writings - in short, compelling style and novelty but failure to use parsimony and substance, too much confidence in opinions reached via long chains of mostly inference - even when they wrote on non-political topics. What I'm NOT saying is that all reactionary users are behaving unethically in the manner of Neir.)
His stuff was occasionally interestingly contrarian. I think it's useful to have a few people around with political/social opinions outside the usual LW space of lukewarm leftist to libertarian to technocrat, if only to help avoid groupthink.
On the other hand, while it's nice to have someone to point out that the emperor is naked, it usually needs to be done in a way that's relatively hard to dismiss as a hateful diatribe.
Agreed. Though, getting any change to this site (minor or major) has proven to be extremely difficult.
I approve of this step over nothing, though I do hope dekarmification does happen.
Thanks, Kaj, you are a hero!!!
Sorry for the pressure; I have already removed my post. Some clarifications: (1) It was not aimed only towards you personally. I know you hate some aspects of this job; and perhaps that is a good thing. But if you would hate it too much, then the logical solution would be that the Powers would appoint additional moderator, less averse against this kind of dirty work. (2) I was afraid that the actual result would be something less than ban and disclosure. A quiet solution behind the scenes would leave too many open questions, e.g. did we have only one mass downvoter, or more of them? The victims deserved an answer. Leaving the decision to community could lead to a popularity contest between political factions. (3) I believe than banning a user from logging in to LW should be very easy: just go to the database and change their password, that's all. If there is a chance to regenerate the lost password by e-mail, then remove their e-mail too. Or just change their password to "xyz", log in under their username, go to preferences, and click "Delete".
I hope this will lead to better trust and relationships among the LW users.
Thank you!
Though the biggest part of the credit belongs to jackk, for doing the technical work that allowed us to actually establish Eugine's guilt and for helping with the technical process of banning him.
We still don't know. But now there is a precedent for what to do about them, which might act as a deterrent.
I'd like to just add a quick note that I think is worth emphasizing for people reading this thread: there's an obvious temptation to read Eugine's actions as reflecting his political and philosophical viewpoints here, and it wouldn't even be that hard to think of post-hoc hypotheses connecting them. Please don't do this. I caught myself starting to do it, and it really isn't helpful. Events like this say more about individuals than their belief systems.
Connecting a specific political view point to this behavior is a post-hoc hypothesis.
But perhaps it was possible to predict in advance that if this happens, it will more likely be done by a person with strong political opinions (of any kind).
However, that lesson is already included in understanding that "politics is the mindkiller".
His downvotes were certainly largely politically/philosophically motivated; I and several other people (off the top of my head the only other name I remember was daenerys) noted the downvote floods beginning specifically after debating "Culture War"-type topics; LGBT issues, feminism, racism, etc.
I don't think that's what you intended to say, but it's an easy misreading, so clearing that up.
Oh sure, (I was potentially downvoted for the same reason). The point isn't that they weren't politically motivated but rather that one shouldn't think the inclination to defect in this fashion is somehow more connected to a specific political viewpoint. Someone on the end opposite Eugine on these issues could easily be motivated to do the same thing.
For the sake of completeness:
other users whose downvoters I asked Jack to look at were brazil84, Desrtopa, NancyLebovitz, and JoshuaZ. A couple of them might have been the targets of mass downvoting (by other users) as well, but I did not feel that the pattern of downvote totals was sufficient to establish this beyond a reasonable doubt. They're encouraged to contact the moderators in case they seem to be targeted in the future, however.
Fair enough. The period when I was suspecting that I was being mass down-voted was relatively short-- possibly less than a year. I could have been wrong, or your methods might have been suited for detecting longer term patterns.
Thanks for dealing with Eugene.
His comments showed a strong tendency to oppose empathy-- offhand, I can't think of anyone else at LW who went as far that direction. I'm proposing that anti-empathy attitudes might correlate with willingness to hurt people.
I have mixed feelings about Eugine's banning, since he was a member with whom I experienced friction more than most, possibly any others outside a short time frame, and I often considered him to be aggressive or uncharitable in his general demeanor to other members, but on the other hand, I considered him to be an occasional source of valuable input.
Although it's probably an ignoble motivation, I think I'm also influenced by the fact that I still occasionally frequent other sites online where Eugine is likely to still frequent, and the prospect of hearing him, or more likely other reactionaries, complaining about how his banning is a symptom of Less Wrong shutting out reactionary voices, is liable to be obnoxious.
Thank you for letting me know about this.
Also, even if you are not sure beyond a reasonable doubt, would you mind undoing the mass downvote? I realize it's a bit immature and shameful for me to care about it, but if it's not too much trouble I would prefer to have my karmassassination undone. It seems to me that the standard for banning someone should not necessarily be the same as the standard for undoing a mass downvote.
It's not that big of a deal to me. (If it were, I would have set up a sock puppet account to boost my karma score.) But still, I care a little bit.
Also, in another exchange, another poster (I believe it was Jack - hopefully not the same Jack) seized upon my negative karma ratio as a justification for not answering a question I asked. I realize that this was just a rationalization, but it's still annoying.
I don't think that I'd feel comfortable reversing someone's votes if I wasn't reasonably certain that they had actually been abusing the system.
Well what exactly is the source of your doubt? As I recall, somebody down-voted most or all of my posts in the space of a few hours. Do you agree that this happened?
So with several of the other users that Eugine had hit, the difference between his downvote total and that of the second-highest downvoter was quite drastic: in one case, there were 26 times as many downvotes from Eugine as from the second highest downvoter.
The pattern is different in your case: the top ten downvote balances against your account are 150, 74, 55, 36, 32, 31, 28, 20, 19, 17. (Eugine doesn't appear to have hit you, as he isn't included in this list.) It's plausible that the 150 person is a mass downvoter, and also that the 74 person is, given that the 74 person also had a suspiciously high downvote count towards another person. But at the same time, it also looks like there were a lot of people downvoting your comments. If I assume that most of the users in this list were "legitimate" downvoters, then I'm unsure of whether this data alone is sufficient to indicate exactly who the mass downvoter(s) was. The 150 person is the most likely culprit, but maybe it was several of the lower-ranking ones acting independently from each other, and the 150 one just happened to see a lot of your comments that he didn't naturally like? Whose downvotes should I have reversed, and whose should I let stand?
Then again, I don't know how large of a fraction 150 comments is of your total comment history: if it's a high percentage, then then it sounds more plausible that the person in question is indeed a mass-downvoter, since it would be much more unlikely for them to run into 150 of your comments that they just naturally disliked.
And now I have the feeling that the rational course of action would be to pick some percentage where I'd act as if this was a confirmed mass-downvoter, before hearing the answer to "what percentage of your comments is this"... but I don't have a very good clue of where I should set the burden of evidence in cases where the situation isn't blazingly obvious.
Just based on brazil84's karma total, the 150 number seems unlikely to be more than 50% of brazil84's posts. It seems very much within the margin of statistical error that there would be a number that high, especially given the other users with large numbers of downvotes against brazil84. I think reversing the votes on this amount of evidence would be a pretty big stretch, fwiw (despite being strongly in favor of the earlier ban as well as reversing all of Eugine's votes).
When the mass downvoting took place, I had a lot fewer posts.
Does the system tell you when the downvotes were made?
What about the attack on MugaSofer from May 2013 (ticket on the issue tracker)?
I missed that. I'll ask Jack to take a look.
A couple other cases, if they're worth looking at —
http://lesswrong.com/lw/9l7/whats_going_on_here/ (RobertLumley, January 2012)
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ir4/open_thread_september_30_october_6_2013/9uv4 (me, October 2013 et seq.)
You have 1579 downvotes from Eugine.
Robert looks to have a number of downvotes from several low-karma (20ish) users who, based on the style of their usernames and comments, look like they were all socks of a single person. Not sure what to do about that.
MugaSofer does have a lot of downvotes from Eugine, but Eugine doesn't seem to be the main culprit; there's another user with a downvote balance of 1625 votes against MugaSofer.
Given that I'm not aware of this other user having engaged in a systematic downvoting of anyone else, and given that MugaSofer expressed a preference for not having the mass downvoters banned, I will just issue that user a warning as well as let MugaSofer know who was downvoting him. MugaSofer may choose to make that information public or keep it between the two of them, as he wishes. I'll also ask if the downvotes of that person could be undone.
Thank you, Kaj. I really do appreciate your handling of this, if I haven't said that already; I know these things can be difficult.
I got your message, and I've received an apology and explanation from the person in question. I think I'll keep their identity quiet, although - in the interests of lessening wrongness - anyone who cares, if such a person exists, should PM me and we can talk about it.
(I think Eugine's downvotes are just that: a whole lot of downvotes. We've disagreed a few times, I'm not too surprised. Still, it's a shame to see him go.)
I endorse this decision and think more mod action in general is good
Thank you for doing this.
I was still posting on LW after the downvoting started, but I was definitely coming to the site less, reading less, and especially posting less. I'm not sure if was entirely due to the downvoting, as it started about when people were saying the quality of posts started to decrease. But for me, just going on to LW and seeing the decreased karma became a bit of an ugh field.
Eugine_Nier was exactly who I was referring to in the other thread about mass downvoting when I said I had noticed certain members who had a long string of "-1" votes on comments they were replying to and with which they disagreed.
I think he was a perfect example of the flaw in the karma system, but to see him investigated and removed for this behavior is very encouraging.
Question: Daenarys rarely posts now and by her description part of that was due to the systematic downvoting. Has someone contacted her ourside LW to let her know this has happened?
I believe that she is aware of it thanks to someone sharing the link to this post on Facebook.
I'm pretty sure I was also a victim, if a rather recent and relatively small scale one, and I'm glad to see something was done. However much I told myself it wasn't really important, that karma's a horribly noisy measure, with a few slightly funny comments gaining me the majority of my karma while my most thoughtful contributions usually only gathered a handful, the block downvoting really did make me feel disinclined to post new comments. Banning seems like an extreme measure, and I guess I can see where people who think there should have been warnings are coming from, but I'm actually kind of surprised that it was all or nearly all one person, and given the amount of distress it seems to have caused, I think we can do without a person like that around here, even if he did sometimes contribute good comments.
Precisely the same situation here. I almost stopped posting entirely after the first wave of downvotes he dumped on me.
Is it not possible for an administrator to change the password on Eugine's account to something that would take Eugine a few decades to crack? Is it not possible for an administrator, having done that, to log on to Eugine's account and reverse the now-defined-against-the-rules votes, if not by script then by hand?
I had a brief period of block down votes (it was obvious, as only old comments were being downvoted, and it was a continual, regular process), but it passed quickly.
I think the ban was justified because of the number of people targeted. Going after one person is bad, but vendettas are understandable (if not approved). But going after huge amounts of people... Well, there we have to multiply.
As for those deploring the ban, I can see your deontological position, but do you think that Less Wrong is going to become measurably worse because of this decision?
I've been thinking of the ban as deontological-- the premise is that Eugene has shown himself to be a sufficiently bad sort of person that he just isn't worth having around.
Perhaps it's a matter of competing deontological frameworks.
<nitpick> Surely that's virtue-ethical, not deontological? </nitpick>
You may be right. I thought deontogical covers all "do the right thing no matter what happens" systems.
Why? Seriously asking. I see no evidence that we were somehow powerless to stop this without banning him.
But if that were the case I would definitely be in favor of doing so.
Well ... yeah. Worse by one user.
(It's not as if his contributions were terrible, remember, a troll that we're well rid of - Eugine was a high-karma user, that's how he was able to downvote so many comments.)
How could you possibly know this?
I would interpret it as signaling the mod's resolve rather than expressing an iron-clad precommitment. Changing one's mind based on new information is certainly not a trait Kaj lacks.
I read it as specifically resolving not to be moved by a Clever Arguer, or even many clever arguers; i.e. precommitting not to cave to political pressure. That is exactly the position a mod should take.
Moderation doesn't have to be perfect, but it should not be fickle. Walking the line between being authoritative and being authoritarian is difficult. If a mod shrinks back from that, you get a failure mode where mod actions are reversible by pressure alone, and mod authority carries no weight. Of course, you can also have an opposite failure mode where the mod behaves dictatorially or else simply uses their power too lightly.
So far I think Kaj has handled this well, whether or not I agree with the specific punishment handed down. He's acted with both weight and care. Here's hoping that continues.
It is also a disincentive against possible hundreds of comments debating what should have been done differently, etc. I am sure Kaj does not want to spend the rest of his life debating that.
Just remember the situation with the "basilisk", where Eliezer removed a few comments, and then years later we had threads after threads debating whether Eliezer should or shouldn't have done it, what he should have done instead, etc.
We should not punish moderators for making any decision by wasting additional hours of their time debating how wrong they were. I mean, we have less than one such decision per year, so it's not like we are living under a horrible oppressive censorship. Moderators have to make decisions, and of course someone will disagree. Especially on a website full of contrarians, saying that things should have been solved differently will always be the popular thing to do.
I think Kaj is trying to do a job he does not particularly want to do. I think that because he has said that is what is happening and even though he might be signalling, I tend to think that rationalists I respect are usually telling it straight.
I think he is acquitting himself honorably and intelligently, even if I don't particularly agree with the result.
My own values around rationality include the avoidance of stating inaccuracies in the name of signalling. They include not going "over the top" in response to "rule breaking" especially when the rules were not incredibly clear ahead of time. They include living by the consequences of the rules you do set up, so if people need to earn the right to downvote, and having earned it do something which is unpopular but was not explicitly against the rules, then going for a permanent ban AND pre-committing to hold your hands over your ears and scream (so you can't listen) if people start discussing why this might be a bad idea would seem to me to be a bad approach.
If I were the mod, and I'm not, and I will never have nearly enough popularity/karma to be tapped on the shoulder, I would ban Eugine until he agreed not to do massive downvoting anymore. If he chose to stand on principle (whatever principle that might be) and refuse, then he would be banned as long as he felt that way.
Another advantage of an approach like that is Eugine could be asked as part of staying on site to go through and reverse all of his own downvotes. It is not that hard to page through your own comments, see the ones you have downvoted, and click your downvote, cancelling it.
If he were willing to agree not to do it again, and to go through and reverse what he had done, that would seem to suggest to me he should stay around. It would also solve the problems "we" still have of 1) how do we stop him from doing it again and 2) how do we go about reversing what he has done.
I have a major problem with this approach. He believes those downvotes are merited. Attempting to compell him to act against that conviction would be...well, Very Not Cool with me.
[ETA: I'm not sure how to phrase that as strongly as I mean it without also suggesting that I have a serious problem with you for suggesting it. I don't intend offense.]
I'm not sure what else I can say without getting into arguing for or against this specific act of Kaj's, which I'm trying to avoid doing.
Thanks!
If it's easy to tell whether Eugine was mass-downvoting me for a while, I'd be interested to know. I estimate p~=0.8. (But it's not worth a lot of effort; I can't have lost more than a hundred points or so.)
I'm in favour of reversing all Eugine's votes. Reversing just the "mass" ones might be even better; I'm not sure.
I hope this will help establish a new moderatorial norm that suspected mass-downvoting incidents (if there are any more) will be investigated and publicized.
Your account does seem to have about a hundred downvotes from Eugine.
Thanks. (Feeling smug about my estimation skills now.)
Well, it's unfortunate that it came to this, but thank you for resolving it.
I do think it would be useful to update the stated policy with this piece of "case law", as it were; or with the principle that the voting system is intended to express comment on the content, not the contributor.
I'm not upset about the ban but I'll chime in and say in terms of comments rather than mass downvotes I think Eugine Nier was net positive.
I don't think this really helps you. As you acknowledge, this clause does not actually imply that downvoting is harassment at all. Nor does it imply that blocking users is the appropriate response!
Indeed, the fact that explicitly mentions some crimes (leaving rude comments) and punishments (deleting comments) is probably evidence against this moderation action. If the policy had been totally non-specific, it would imply a wide degree of moderator discretion. The more specific it is, the stronger the implication that things left unmentioned are not actually verbotten.
Furthermore, consider that in the case mentioned in the policy (harassing comments) deleting them is a coherent response which addresses the underlying issue, without very much collateral damage. In this case, banning Eugine from posting does not actually prevent him from downvoting, so the objective is not achieved, but considerable collateral damage is inflicted, by ending his often interesting comments.
This is true. OTOH, dicks gonna be dicks, and trolls regard rules as playground equipment.
(I have been on communities where "don't be a dick" is an explicit rule. Guess what? Users who zoom in on this rule and try to argue it ... are pretty much all dicks.)
This, this, 1000 times this. If you tightly police the actions of moderators, who are constrained already to act in good faith, to follow only and exactly the letter of the rules, you will never get a good result. (Because the bad faith users can always find a way around the letter of the rules.)
This is a major failure mode of law in general, IMO.
The specific circumstance is explicitly offered as one particular example of a general policy (it's preceded by "e.g."), so I think there's a pretty strong implication that there are other things left unmentioned that are in fact verboten.
It's pretty much always a mistake to apply legal-style reasoning to moderator actions on an Internet forum, anyway. The job of moderators is to keep the forum working, not merely to follow previously published procedures. Legal rules such as nulla poena sine lege don't apply in this context. They're supposed to wing it a bit when necessary.
"It's like a bar. The idea is to maintain a good time. If you are asked to cool it at a bar, and you start debating the precise details of the rules and the wording thereof and who can eject you when and so forth, the large fellow with the number on his shirt will be guiding you to the exit in short order, possibly with a humorous CLANG off the bins opposite." (from a Facebook group; doesn't quite apply to LW directly)
Sure, but then they shouldn't pretend to be justified on the basis of rules that actually do no such thing. I'm happy with Eliezer's dictatorship, but it should be an epistemically honest dictatorship.
Speaking of which, Eliezer has been strangely silent throughout this whole affair.
Eliezer has been silent on LW in general; I'm pretty sure it has little to do with this.
Unfortunately the origional rule was not really grammatical enough to establish a general policy. If you remove the 'e.g.', as you should from a valid sentance, all we're left with is
Which doesn't even vaguely hint at a general policy!
Have you guys given any thought to doing pagerankish stuff with karma?
Can you elaborate more? I'm guessing you mean people with more karma --> their votes count more, but it isn't obvious how you do that in this context.
Ever since https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato there have been a lot of proposed trust metrics. Many of them function like Pagerank: you start off with a set of 'seed' users and then propagate influence based on how well users match them.
I agree, it is not obvious. Unlike morality though, this seems like the right application area for pagerank ideas. Example: if you want to know about someone in academia, you ask the top 20 people in a field to get a sensible idea.
So it seems worthwhile to think about/experiment with. I think one would need to iterate, I don't think one can get a sensible system from the armchair.
I share the concerns voiced by buybuydandavis, Salemicus, larks, and nywracu.
This isn't necessarily to say I disagree with the banning decision. And I know it must be tough to be a mod, especially when you hadn't planned on becoming one.
But Kaj_Sotala's decision looks like a good case of mission creep. His powers as moderator were originally just for deleting spam; now he has used them for something different. And the behavior of Eugine_Nier does not appear to have clearly broken any rules; Kaj_Sotala has still tried to justify his ban under a very liberal interpretation of the anti-harassment rule. Thus Kaj_Sotala has used powers beyond their intended scope to punish someone who did not really break a rule. And the punishment was probably excessive; a massive karma penalty would probably have sufficed.
Given all this, it may still have been a good decision on net to ban Eugine_Nier. But mission creep is usually just something I read about, not witness live, and it's nice to view it from closer to the "inside."
LW had a problem with not being moderated enough and Kaj was at a place to do something about that issue. He asked the community for feedback and then went ahead. If that's mission creep than I like mission creep.
Interesting point.
(Just so you know, the formatting is broken on your comment - I think you need to put a backslash before your _ symbols in names, looks like they turned into italics.)
Fixed, thanks.
Just wanted to note that giving Eugine -20,000 karma penalty (effectively a 3-year no-voting sentence) instead of the permanent ban (a forum equivalent of the capital punishment) would have worked so much better and is probably trivial to implement. And you guys who upvote the OP for more than simply outing the perp are effectively supporting incompetence. How disappointing.
I want to have someone at LW that moderating and who has the authority to make moderation decisions. Even if I might have done things differently, I'm very grateful that Kaj takes the role of moderating.
I think supporting mild competence is an important step on the path to supporting actual competence. This is a LOT better than the doing nothing that was going on for months even if it was the sub-optimal solution.
We all agree that mild competence is better than none at all. That doesn't explain why shminux's comment has received downvotes.
Eh? The expected result of punishing/insulting people for doing something is people doing nothing.
And the expected result of never pointing out when things can be done better is people doing things incompetently.
There's a difference between attacking a person and suggesting an alternative course of action for them to take.
Like shminux, I am unhappy with the ban, which I consider both disproportionate and ill-advised. Eugine didn't break any specific rule, has (as far as I am aware) never been warned about his conduct by an admin, and yet you jump straight to the ultimate sanction. In my opinion, the correct moderator response is to tell him "Don't do this again." If he doesn't agree with that, or that is considered too lenient, the correct response is to remove his karma privileges. What purpose is served by banning him entirely?
Eugine is one of the highest quality posters here and the site will be poorer for his loss. I am not defending his behaviour in this instance but the punishment does not fit the crime.
Many many people have been complaining about mass downvoting for a long time now. A couple of people have also indicated that it has contributed to them not wanting to participate on LW any more. There have been multiple threads with hundreds of comments about this. Eugine is a very frequent visitor to this site, so I'm sure he was aware of all this. Had he stepped in to one of these threads and defended his actions, or apologized for them, or even discontinued the down-voting without admitting to it, I would agree that banning is disproportionate. But he simply ignored the whole discussion and continued surreptitiously block-downvoting people, despite all the disquiet it was causing.
That shows an almost pathological disregard for the well-being of this community and the opinions of its participants. I don't think banning is an inappropriate response.
That said, I also disagree with your opinion about the general quality of Eugine's comments, and it is quite probable that this is coloring my judgment in this matter.
I agree that it would have been better had Eugine defended himself, because he was obviously aware that he was making people unhappy. But from the sounds of it, he did try to justify/defend his position when contacted by the moderators. Therefore we shouldn't assume he was acting in bad faith; it is just as likely that, in the context that the downvote threads existed in, he didn't think he'd get a fair hearing or that discussion would be helpful. To be clear, I don't agree with his actions, but I don't see them as evincing a "pathological disregard" (your words) or anything like it.
To give an example: gwern has repeatedly insulted me, and recently made a subtle, but personal, jab at me in an Open thread comment. What should my response be? I don't see myself as morally obliged to respond in kind and get into an argument in hostile circumstances. I think the correct behaviour is to rise above it and ignore him . Yet that will also have the effect of confirming, in the mind of gwern and his sympathisers,that I am indeed a troll as he says. I would not like my silence (out of genuine concern for community harmony) to be used against me, particularly by a poster as(IMHO) intellectually bankrupt as gwern. But by the same token I think we shouldn't hold Eugine's public silence against him.
There is a pretty big difference between ignoring one commenter who doesn't like you and ignoring the complaints of a large proportion of the community. This wasn't just one or two people kvetching. It was a large number of people, including many (like me) not directly targeted by the behavior. I don't think you have any obligation to respond to gwern, but if a significant segment of the community objected strongly to your allegedly trollish behavior, and some valuable contributors said they no longer felt comfortable participating on LW because of that behavior, I would consider it "pathological disregard" for you to continue what you were doing as if none of this was happening, without addressing it in any way.
Keep in mind that Eugine continued (surreptitiously) with his block-downvoting not just after a number of users expressed their dissatisfaction, but also after the administration of this site made it clear they disapproved of the behavior. First Eliezer said that he was trying to track down the block downvoter (he failed for some reason), then Kaj put up this post. And Eugine kept down-voting. I don't see how this doesn't read as disregard for the community.
Perhaps he thought he was somehow making the community better by his actions (although it's much more plausible to me that he was just ridiculously mind-killed, since virtually all of the block-downvoting appears to be motivated by political disagreement), but he was still doing it in the face of the community's express wishes, and to the evident detriment of community relations. Thinking that his behavior would make the community better/more successful is so disconnected from the reality of what was actually happening that it qualifies as pathological disregard for the community, I think. Disregard for what people think and how they feel, and disregard for the observable consequences of his behavior.
I don't see a contradiction here. If someone is mind-killed, then from inside it seems like all people with different political opinions are idiots, and the debate would be more rational without them.
Thus in my opinion Eugine completely failed in the lessons about mindkilling and ethical injunctions, and was incompatible with the spirit of Less Wrong.
First, thanks Kaj for doing your best out of a complicated situation. I'm op on some IRC channels, and I also know how difficult it is to take such decisions.
I don't think the ban was a mistake as a penalty (nothing prevents Eugine from creating another account, so it's not that harsh a penalty) but I do think it doesn't solve the main problem. The most important remediation would be to undo all of Eugine's mass downvotes, and if not easily possible, all of Eugine's votes. Any chance of that to happen ?
Huge props and many thanks for doing this, Kaj!
First of all: I agree with shminux. If the point of the site is to create a community that can produce high-quality discussion, rather than one that's full of cooperatebots, banning users who make quality contributions for defecting from social norms that don't directly involve their contributions seems contrary to that point. Maximizing discussion quality requires tradeoffs: if the presence of someone who produces high-quality discussion is so opposed by others who produce same that the town isn't big enough for both of them, someone has to go. But was this the case here? -- that is, what would be the effect of EugineNier's mere presence, as opposed to his ability to mass-downvote? The town isn't big enough for both EugineNier's downvoting and its targets / others who see the community as having become less cooperatish due to that downvoting.
This also sets a dangerous precedent, one which I've seen play out before: the most 'elitist' (offensive/annoying to certain other members, usually of lower quality) users get banned for being 'elitist'/offensive/annoying, with no regard to the effect on quality -- so, naturally, quality goes downward. If you don't bite the noobs, you get Eternal Septembered -- but if you bite too hard, you drive off other users who make high-quality contributions. It's often hard to see which way the tradeoff should go -- on the forum where I most recently saw this dynamic play out to its Septembered conclusion, there were six bans, I only disagreed with one of them, and the most that any user I know of disagreed with was three of the six -- so my intention in pointing this out is not to suggest any hard-and-fast rule, but to call to attention the existence of this tradeoff and suggest an optimization criterion for moderation policy going forward.
I don't know what the LW consensus is on the issue of quality vs. quantity; I naturally favor quality, but I don't have any financial interest, direct or indirect, in any of the organizations/charities in the same general area as LW, so those who are affiliated with MIRI or similar, or who place a much higher priority on their ability to get as much money as possible, may have different interests. I would suggest, however, that quality has a quantity of its own -- that is, that optimizing for high-quality discussion/contributions/etc. will serve as a draw to people who want such an environment, since there aren't all that many environments for that -- and furthermore, that the people drawn in by that are more likely to be well-placed with regard to the ability to propagate the rationalist memeplex and the [concomitant?] awareness of the aforementioned organizations.
Now, another interesting question is: given that the karma system is open by its nature to abuses of this sort, what ought to be done about it? Downvote-bombing is clearly harmful; how can the potential for it be reduced/eliminated?
A few possibilities that I can think of:
Making it so that you can't downvote more than ten posts by one user in a day. (But this might just make it harder to notice.)
Automatic alerts to moderators if a user downvotes more than fifty posts by one user in a week.
A 'tactical nuke' option, to remove all karma from a user found to practice mass downvoting.
A karma lockout option, to remove a user found to practice mass downvoting from the karma system entirely: their posts would still be able to accumulate karma, but they wouldn't be able to either upvote or downvote posts.
As above, but only blocking downvotes.
Simply knowing that you would be outed is likely to be enough of a deterrent, no need for advanced technical solutions.
Did he admit his guilt, or his actions? From the outside, it sounds like the latter.
Begging the question that mass downvoting amounts to harassment. Downvoting is downvoting. Votes can be positive or negative. Would he be similarly banned if he had karma bombed positive votes and it made people feel all warm and fuzzy?
I assumed it was everyone's place to decide how to cast their votes. Think globally, act locally, yada yada. Ironically, he was acting in accordance with the widely held view that some people needed to be silenced to improve the atmosphere.
People told you he "made" them feel bad. I guess "Feel Bad" negative karma votes are ok. And get a lot of action from those with power too.
He remained silent about how he voted, in line with the privacy configuration for votes, which has now been explicitly violated by those with the power entrusted to them. Bad precedent.
Really? Breaking social norms is now verboten in our community of polyamorous transhumans?
Seems to me he was simply acting in accordance with one prevailing norm (one that I disagree with), by violating another (that I agree with).
Other people were part of the causal chain of a "worsened atmosphere". Assigning him as "the cause" is a judgment. Me, I'm not enthusiastic with the prevailing culture of "I'm upset, therefore you're wrong."
And the pitchforks came out. Three years, 9000+ karma. Now, banned for life. The mob is fickle.
Funny thing is, I was equally unimpressed with all the signal to noise complaints. I've turned off filtering based on karma. I'd rather filter based on vote count than vote sum.
I find an atmosphere of bad feelings and social shunning rather tiresome all the way around. Buck up and don't shun - that's my preferred atmosphere, and that goes for Eugine and the concerns about signal to noise as much as those who would ban him now for hurt feelings.
All indications are his negative votes were for people being MoreWrong, in his opinion. Having people think you're MoreWrong is unpleasant. I don't think the ideal answer is to shut up those who share that opinion with you.
Instead of social shunning, would you perhaps prefer the situation where Eugine was allowed to single-handedly send away new users he personally didn't like? Because that's what we had here until now. (i.e. Kaj's solution may not be perfect, but it's a huge improvement.)
I consider mass-downvoting of new users to be much worse than mass-downvoting of old users. Old users usually (1) have enough karma to survive the attack, (2) understand what's going on, even if they don't know who exactly did it, and (3) if they complain, they are guaranteed to have our sympathies, and they know it. New users don't have a clue; they may believe they are disliked by the whole community.
Imagine if Ander, instead of complaining publicly, just walked away. Should we feel less sorry for him than we feel for Eugine? Also, some other users may have had the same experience and just walked away silently; we wouldn't know about this.
Eugine expressed that he found certain people MoreWrong. As far as I know, that's it. Isn't something of the point of this place, to distinguish LessWrong from MoreWrong? But not if some people feel uncomfortable thereby?
But I was incorrect.
Eugine engaged in a very weak and cowardly shunning - anonymous karma bombing.
But he hasn't really been shunned in turn, because people don't seem to have the stomach for it. He's been banished through technical means, and had his "anonymous" karma votes similarly exposed through technical means. Instead of shunning, power was used against him because people said they felt bad from being downvoted.
Is that the kind of list you'd like, people complain about their hurt feelings from someone else's evaluation of them, and he's banished?
Think you never "make" people feel bad?
If people wanted to shun him, and ignore with a public plonk, that would have been fine with me. Good, in fact. Call him out for being an ass, if you think he was one. Great. But instead, let's not actually deal with the person, let's just excommunicate him if we have the ear and sympathy of he who wields the kill switch.
Seems to me that there are some very different cultures here on the list.
We can cut each other some slack, or we can fight for control of that kill switch.
The world is full of people who were never here in the first place. I don't lose sleep over it.
And if some guy leaves because he can't handle the thought of someone thinking him incorrect, I can live with that too, as I doubt that he has the right stuff to benefit much from this place, or benefit others here much in turn.
But note that I, softy that I am, wasn't thereby telling him or anyone to get lost, I was trying to encourage him and others to get over their dismay at being thought wrong by others, which, IMO, would be good for them personally, and good for the function of the list generally.
But apparently that suggestion makes me a horrible person in the eyes of many. Fine. People have different values. Their values aren't mine either.
He had no power to send people away. People who left, chose to leave. The continued formulations of this episode which portray his targets as helpless victims lacking agency are dysfunctional. They act and chose too.
New users should have some clue on what to expect on the internet, including encountering jerks. And they should have some expectation at LessWrong that someone may express that they are MoreWrong.
But again, I'm a softy, and generally cut extra slack for newbies. I've already expressed that I disapprove of karma bombing. I disapprove of plenty in this thread as well. But I haven't seen anything that would have me reaching for the kill switch.
And the proper way to expose the fallacies in someone's opinions is downvoting all their comments, both those that contain the fallacies, and those that don't? Even including, if I remember correctly, meetup announcements?
And if perchance I disagree with Eugine's opinion about a user X, the proper way to express my disagreement would be to upvote all their comments, both those smart and those not smart; because otherwise my vote has smaller value than Eugine's? And then if we all adopt this norm, we will keep upvoting and downvoting comments according to the users' popularity, regardless of the merits of specific comments? Why not simplify the whole system and upvote and downvote users directly? -- Do you have the same political opinion as I do? Upvoted. The opposite opinion? Downvoted. Certainly there is a lesson somewhere about how this would lead to increased rationality.
You know, in the political debates I often had a similar position like Eugine. But I didn't mass-downvote my opponents, and as far as I know, none of them mass-downvoted me. Something like implicit cooperation in a prisonners' dilemma. Which allowed the debates to be much more civilized than most of the internet. Which I enjoyed. I partially blame Eugine for destroying this possibility of having civilized political debates on LW. It's hard to have a respectful debate, when one of participants is systematically downvoted regardless of whether they made a smart or stupid comment, whether they made a fallacy or exposed their opponent's fallacy. How are people supposed to learn and change their minds in such a debate? Isn't that one of the purposes of Less Wrong?
In the past I have explicitly objected against trying to bring new members based on their political opinion, to create a "balance". But removing new members based on their political opinion, that's even worse. At least the former contributes to the growth of the community, and there is a chance that those people might changed their opinions when exposed to intelligent arguments against. The latter just promotes one view; and if someone would update in the wrong direction, well, they might suddenly find their karma disappearing miraculously.
Which I believe is a great thing! Eugine's actions did not start an arms race of mutual mass-downvoting. Not even on a website where many people have the ability to write a script for doing it, so such warfare wouldn't cost them too much energy. (For example, I probably would be able to writte one. I have previously used Perl scripts to scrape content from some websites; maybe it would be relatively easy to customize them for LW. I didn't try.)
Here you use too general terms. There are many ways to make people "feel bad"; but we are talking specifically about mass-downvoting here. People were making each other feel bad by posting comments the other side didn't agree with, politically, pretty often. No one was ever banned for that.
We had a few threads complaining about the mass-downvoting (although the identity of the downvoter wasn't confirmed then), so it kinda happened.
Just to be sure how deep is the cultural difference: does mass-downvoting of new users belong to the "cut each other some slack" category? Should we aim for a balance of "I will mass-downvote the new users who seem to be on your side, and in turn you can mass-downvote the new users who seem to be on my side, and perhaps we can try destroying each other by downvoting scripts, but no one will call the moderator to intervene"?
I see your points, but...
But what if shunning didn't work?
I have 12 500 or so Karma. That gives me around 50 000 downvotes. That's enough to zero out tens if not hundreds of contributors, especially if I concentrated on newbies. I could literally zero them out - keep them at zero, whatever they posted (and prevent them from posting top level comments), and either break them or the Karma system. Then once they'd left, I could reverse all my downvotes, and apply them to someone else.
If I was that cruel, and willing to ignore people's opinions, then shunning would have no effect on me, nor would it reduce my power to cause destruction. At some point, something other that social means would be needed to stop me.
Thank you for listening to them.
Exactly. "At some point." We were a good ways away from the hypothetical you described. Social response should be commensurate with the social problem.
The example given is some guy who lost like 40 points? Let's say that was the scale of the issue for a dozen people. This is a trivial problem for any individual, save for their propensity to curl up in a fetal position when someone on the internet expresses through those 40 points that he thinks their posts aren't up to snuff.
I think I've lost more karma responding to this nonsense, and spent much time responding as well, because I find the response a little out of proportion, a little unfair, and worst of all, an empowering of the "you hurt my feelings, shut up" principle.
The social problem he was responding to was a perceived worsening of the signal to noise ratio, and a sizable chunk of the list seemed to share that opinion, and share that karma feedback was an appropriate response for the desired end state of shutting some people up, though I think that individual karma bombing has limited support.
I believe the solution I had suggested was for the moderators to contact the karma bomber and tell him "hey, you're causing a problem, can you knock it off?"
That might have ended it without further escalation, and we could have all go on our merry way.
I don't know the details of the discussion between Kaj and Eugine. Maybe that was it.
Solution if he won't knock it off?
I'm torn. Which is the bigger problem - people taking action to protect their tender ears from the "noise" of posts they don't like, or people taking action to protect their tender feelings from being hurt when someone expresses disapproval? Both are quite disruptive and tiresome, IMO.
First, there should be pretty easy technical countermeasures that would limit the power of any karma bombing campaign. Limiting all votes to your karma limit would be a nice start, particularly compelling to the signal to noise enthusiasts.
Second, often these "I've been karma bombed" threads provoke a karma telethon, where the target gets karma back and "validation" from interested parties. User affirmed, gets karma back, and widespread condemnation of karma bombing educates users on the problem of karma bombing and the general disapproval of it. Probably a necessary price to pay periodically.
Third, if the list wants to make an explicit policy against karma bombing, fine, let them do it, but applying it retroactively is bad form, IMO. The policy could be made after a thread inviting opinions on the policy, where people could discuss the general issue of policy somewhat divorced from their interest in a particular instance. This is a price I'd hope we could have avoided.
Fourth - I think there is widespread disapproval of karma bombing, even from the signal to noise purifiers. If the behavior continues in the face of explicit policy, then you can kick him off while mitigating any backlash and mollifying people with more concern for due process.
You make some valid points. And possibly I'd have done things differently, were I a moderator. Possibly.
But this kind of phrasing isn't helpful:
Either the overall Karma system does its job (by using feelings, or reputation, or whatever), or it doesn't. It doesn't, no one would care. Clearly, they do care, so it is doing some of its job. Yay!
Eugine exploited a technical and social loophole, and threatened to destroy the whole system. Hyperbole? Do you really want to see competitive karma bombing, rushing to nuke your opponent's score before they can do it to you? Reducing this level of misbehaviour to "feelings were hurt" is entirely misleading. Eugine cheated (exploited what was self evidently a difficult to close loophole), people got angry at being cheated (a useful evolutionary response) and the cheating could have irreparably damaged the website.
Yeah, I get that a lot.
Then again, I think a lot of other people's phrasing isn't helpful. I think many of their ideas are positively harmful. But in any group, I don't always expect to get my way.
It's funny that all the people bemoaning his karma bombing of others where he perceives their irrationality, have little compunction about karma bombing my posts here so that I have to spend karma to not be rude and leave people hanging who took the time and effort to respond to me.
I've made arguments all the way through here. Anyone here saying I'm simply irrational? Not making any points? Can't put an argument together?
Not that I've seen. It's all tone. It's all about hurt feelings. It's all about having different values. If I were karma voting on those terms, I'd get carpal tunnel syndrome in a week. Click click click click click.
Look upthread at my -6, followed by your 100% +9. So, in your estimate, is that an accurate evaluation of our comparative rationality in those two posts? I was abysmally irrational, and you're pristinely rational and insightful?
Looking at the pattern of votes, I think it's unlikely that even the majority of my downvotes came from people who actually read each of my posts. A lot of people are just signaling disapproval. Like Eugine was doing.
Eugine is at least downvoting people on his perception of their rationality quotient.
Who's really cheating here?
But is there anyone sharpening the tines of their pitchforks for these new cheaters? Strange how the pitchforks magically align to ideological north, instead of cheating north.
Hurt feelings are the crux of the matter. The "cheating" business is a minor transgression serving as rationalization for the picthforks, and as we've seen, a rationalization hardly consistently applied.
Turn all of Eugine's downvotes to upvotes. Still "cheating". Should provoke the same outrage, if the outrage was really about cheating. Do you maintain upvotes would have provoked the same outrage?
I think, people would have disapproved a little, but there would have nowhere near the level of stink about it, and he would not have been banned.
Yep. He was a minor annoyance that people blew up into major drama that was much more destructive.
Meanwhile, he was also a poster with 9000 karma. Seems like he was producing a good deal of value for some people. Not anymore.
As to what I'd really want - to be God Emperor, of course, but the Universe shows no sign of obliging any time soon. So I'm putting those plans on hold for the near future, and likewise don't expect a list with a lot of people with very different values and preferences than mine to conform themselves to what I really want. Or even kind of want.
And that's the difference. Live and let live. Even with assholes, who largely are just people with different values. I thought Eugine was being a dick, but <shrug>. The world is an imperfect place. Other people are being karma dicks here, but <shrug>. I'd rather we kept our powder dry for things that really mattered.
I do see a problem with that strategy, but I don't know that you're going to like the solution. Basically, people who give others slack are great when they get together. They have a nice buffer from real conflict. Throw in a few random slack takers, and they're annoying, but the preponderance of slackers can easily mitigate the damage and dissuade the assholes through numbers, if not intensity.
But when with enough slack takers, and particularly those pulling in the same direction, slack givers are just giving out more and more slack until the slack takers hang them with it. A few random slack takers like Eugine aren't a problem, but a large contingent of slack takers pulling in the same direction are. Against them, slack givers may have to hold the line on slack.
Again, not what I really want, but maybe what I should be doing.
Karma is supposed to influence behaviour.
You do realize that karma is more than just a feel-good point system, right? If your karma is low enough, it materially hinders your ability to participate on this site. You can't make discussion posts, or top-level comments, and you have a limited ability to reply to comments. All of this actively discourages low-karma users from participating, not just by making them feel bad, but by actually making participation a hassle.
So a newbie who has been karma-bombed may not be leaving simply because he can't handle the heat; he may be leaving because, with the ability to meaningfully accrue karma denied to him, he faces numerous annoying technical obstacles to participation (and certain modes of participation are effectively closed off to him).
Yes.
True, but that was how it was expressed (not exactly in those terms, of course).
It's extra important to police the social norms of a community that's about breaking the prevailing social norms, if you want to have a community at all. The norms you police are the borders of your community.
Given that the downvoting continues unabated (just got a couple of dozen drop), he clearly does not think he did anything wrong.
What a weird system, that he is banned but can still vote.
But maybe someone else took up his sword?
(And no, it wouldn't be me.)
But back to the issue of his guilt, per the OP, he was confronted and gave his reason. Sounds like he meant it in the first place, and considered it a public service.
From OP:
Karmacampaigning is an interesting case-- it doesn't seem likely to cause damage in the same way that karmabombing does.
Sometimes I'll find my karma going up, and it's hard to find out which comment or post is attracting karma. A karma dif option (probably with a time frame) would be nice, but I don't know how hard it would be to add.
I'd like that too.
He did it with the intention of driving away people from the community. Doing things with the intention of weeding out people is well described as harassment.
Eugine would have had the possibility to respond to Kaj with an apology and a promise to not engage in this activity again in the future. From Kaj summary it looks like he didn't. While I would have prefered a solution where he could have stayed, I think strong moderation is valuable and I therefore support Kaj's decision.
It's good for the forum to drive some people out. The question is in correctness of particular decisions about driving people out and in acceptability of means of doing so. Applying the concept of harassment is misleading (noncentral), as it suggests incorrect conclusions (e.g. driving people out is undesirable in general), even if some of the other conclusions happen to be correct (e.g. disapproval of Eugine's behavior).
(One currently accepted method of deciding to drive a user out is to see if most of their comments are significantly downvoted by many users, and if they keep posting similar stuff regardless. If that's the case, their comments start getting deleted, which is a means of driving them out or motivating them to reduce active participation.)
That is likely to be true, but I'd argue that it's not good for the forum if a single self-selected mostly-anonymous person is the only one deciding who gets driven out.
'Single' implies that consensus among the community is not required; 'self-selected' implies that anyone with an end goal different to that of the site can attempt to force their goal on the community; mostly-anonymous implies a lack of accountability for their decisions. These are all red flags.
Yeah, I believe even the signal to noise crowd is generally opposed to individual karma bombing.
Questions:
How are you going to deal with socks?
Are you going to be implementing a more systematic process for detecting karma abuses?
Can those who have been negatively affected by this receive an adjustment?
3a. If you are considering karma adjustments, could you please do them in a way that restores percentages rather then points? I, for one, don't care about my "fake internet points" very much, but the ratio of upvotes to downvotes is VERY useful to me as a barometer for the overall integrity of my thought processes. (If others who have been affected by this disagree, please speak up.)
Does the system keep track about individual downvotes (who downvoted what)? If yes, then it could be possible to simply revert all votes ever by Eugine. Which should solve all the problems: everyone would have the same total karma and comment karma as if this whole thing never happened.
It has to - otherwise you wouldn't be able to see what YOU upvoted/downvoted.
Also, otherwise you would be able to upvote or downvote something multiple times.
So clearly, it has to track somewhere.
If you guys need a SQL guy to help do some development work to make meta-moderation easier, let me know; I'll happily volunteer a few hours a week.
EDIT: AAAUUUGH REDDIT'S DB USES KEY-VALUE PAIRS AIIEEEE IT ONLY HAS TWO TABLES OH GOD WHY WHY SAVE ME YOG-SOTHOTH I HAVE GAZED INTO THE ABYSS AAAAAAAIIIIGH okay. I'll still do it. whimper
GIVE THAT USER UPVOTES FOR BRAVERY. Thank you.
I was scrolling through, saw this comment and reread ialdabaoth's comment and upvoted, which I wouldn't have without yours. upvoted.
Maybe that's why volunteer dev work for LW is so hard to come by. Everybody takes one look at the DB and decides they would prefer a very long vacation in Sarlacc, Tatooine.
Didn't even get to the point of getting the DB up and running when I looked into it before I ran out of motviation (at that time). LW-hacking is not particularly accessible, though it's not clear how high making it more accessible is as a priority.
When did you last try? You should be able to more-or-less go
git checkout->vagrant upand have everything pretty much ready to go. https://github.com/tricycle/lesswrong/wiki/Development-VM-ImageWell, that explains a couple of things.
The Reddit guys really, really dislike doing schema updates at their scale. They were getting very slow, and their replication setup was not happy about being told to, say, index a new column while people are doing lots of reads and writes at the same time. So they eventually said "to hell with it; we'll just make a document database, with no schema, and handle consistency problems by not handling them. Man, do not even ask us about joins." This seems to have made them much happier than the 'better' database design they used to use, which is important when you're a too-small team dealing with terrifying scaling issues, and you know that a lot of people are watching you because they are the ones causing the scaling issues.
This design sure does make writing SQL queries a pain, though, and it's less than ideal for a site like Less Wrong, which doesn't do much changing the code.
Being fairly ignorant of databases... how would you have laid it out better, in a general sense?
Structured tables. One for posts, one for comments, one or more for karma and so on, with appropriately typed columns for each attribute such things have. Alternatively if the data really is unstructured then I'd use a key-value store like Cassandra or something.
(For the record many modern key-value stores didn't exist when the Reddit code was originally written).
Seconding this. A proper relational database would look something like this:
With that schema, all you'd have to do to see someone's effect on another person's karma is:
EDIT: Wow, formatting is a pain.
It's heartwarming to see off-the-cuff SQL that includes foreign key constraints.
Heartwarming enough to offer me a job? ;)
EDIT: Downvoted? Ouch...
I'm hoping that the fact that your total karma restricts the amount of downvoting that you can do would limit the usefulness of socks for this purpose. Of course there are ways to get around that, but it's an inconvenience for the downvoters. If there looks to be a problem anyway, we'll try to figure something out.
Would need to figure out one first. Many of the proposals I've seen so far require code changes.
jackk mentioned the possibility of reversing Eugine's votes by running a script to upvote the comments that he had downvoted. We can do that if the people who were targeted have an interest in it.
It's better than nothing, but as mentioned before, I'd prefer something that systematically eliminates the downvotes rather than upvoting over them:
Let's say I've made 1600 comments, received +2400 "legitimate" upvotes, and -400 "legitimate" downvotes.
Thus, I should have a karma of 2000 (86% positive). But along comes Eugine, and downvotes everything, giving me another -1600. This puts my karma at 400 (55% positive). You then run a script to upvote everything he downvoted, giving me +1600 karma. This puts me at 2000 (66% positive).
As you can see, I'm STILL below the 70% positive that Eliezer mentioned as his intuitive threshold for "quality contributors", even though in reality I should be well above that threshold.
This is, in fact, what pissed me off about my karmassassination in the first place - my 'fake internet points' don't matter to me, but my ratio of upvotes to downvotes DOES, because I use it to track how likely it is that I have systematic flaws in my reasoning. This breaks down when the majority of my up- and down-voting comes from one or two concentrated sources, even if one of those sources is directly countering the other.
Ah, I see. That's a reasonable request, I'll ask if there's anything that can be done about it.
Places to start looking:
I don't know how extensively this site's source code has been modified from the reddit default, but in r2/models/vote.py we have:
Python isn't currently in my active language cache, so I'm a little rusty dragging through all the dependencies; I'll try to spend this weekend getting up to speed with Python and see if I can help sort out a generic "wipe out a user's full voting history" script that can be safely run.
Villiam's solution is better, I think. The system certainly keeps track of who downvoted what and allows reversions, because I can see and revert my own up or downvotes.
Further improvement: Remove only downvotes against users he specifically targeted. Whatever remains is probably still a valid signal. That might be a more complex script, though.
Find all sets of Eugine's votes on comments by particular users, filter out any sets such that there are less than ten votes within that set or the ratio of upvotes to downvotes is greater than, say, 0.2, and reverse any downvotes in the remaining sets? That sounds like it should be compactly doable with SQL, although I don't know a thing about the LW database.
That's why I hedged a bit. I know SQL is capable of doing such a thing, but I don't know anything about the LW database either.
Total karma won't restrict people like Eugine at all. The vast bulk of his karma seemed to come from the monthly rationality quote threads, where ten minutes of web surfing and copy/paste can get you 10-100 positive karma. You can even loot old monthly threads if you want, people will still think it's worth upvoting if they even remember it's been posted before.
IMHO the monthly quote threads (and possibly other similar types of thread) should not contribute to karma total.
Not really a problem. To gain a lot of downvote power, short of creating a bunch of circle-upvote socks, you'd need to comment or write a lot, and longtime commenters like Eugine are generally easy to spot: everyone has idiosyncratic ideas, ways of phrasing things, writing styles, references and calculations... (without even getting into stylometrics). For example, if I were banned today and surfaced under another sock a month from now, I'd be spotted quickly - just look for the new account that uses lots of hyphens, semicolons, lists, quotations and paraphrases, etc in discussing topics like statistical & experimental methodology. Similarly, Eugine has a lot of idiosyncratic interests (global warming, the fall of the west, conservative family values and so on).
This is the same reason the worst special-interest trolls on Wikipedia didn't benefit much from socking: they had too clear a fingerprint in their arguments and writings.
True, but in my experience, Eugine's primary karma engine was karma-mining the Rationalist Quotes page; someone could simply commit to ONLY posting there, and build a pretty substantial resource pool rather quickly.
Nah. The quotes make up <1/5th of his top-ranked comments, and you can see for yourself: load http://www.ibiblio.org/weidai/lesswrong_user.php?u=Eugine_Nier , wait for it to fetch all his comments, "sort by: points", "hide parents", copy-paste down to, say, his comments with +9 karma, and then look at the composition:
Of his comments ranked >= 9 points, 20/108 or <1/5 were on rationality quote pages. I suppose he could be getting much more karma from masses of lower-ranked comments on quotes pages, but that seems a bit unlikely and more work than I want to do at the moment.
gwern: Testing our hypotheses since 2009.
Thanks for the info; I was not expecting the data to show that. It does indicate that the problem will be smaller than I feared.
Even a casual inspection of his comments page will reveal that he posted a lot in threads other than quote threads, that his comments were of reasonably good quality, and that they were frequently upvoted (and occasionally downvoted). I don't think there could be any system that would have stopped him from mass downvoting people by manipulating what counts for karma, as he was basically a contributing member of comment society.
He did have a lot of good comments, but he also had a lot of very negative comments. Hypothetically a system could look for people with a very wide range of scores and flag them for deeper inspection.
Now rewrite what you said as an SQL query...
:D
The serious answer is that the people who were downvoted noticed that they were downvoted. That was the whole point. At that moment, they should contact a moderator and report a suspicion. And we should make this visible somehow...
Anyway, the main damage was from knowing that someone mass-downvotes you anonymously, and you don't know who, and you can't defend. (And that it keeps happening to multiple people, for months.) This shouldn't happen again, because it would be easier to fix the next time.
Using reddit's database schema? Challenge accepted. I'm at work right now (writing SQL queries for my college, in fact), but I'll gladly contribute something useful when I get home.
EDIT: This is a lot more difficult than anticipated. :( I'm going to have to do some serious research before I can produce something useful, given reddit's flat kvp schema.
Interesting- I don't think percentage is a useful metric (it can easily be a metric of controversy rather than thought quality). The really concerning thing about mass downvoting is what it can do to the perception of comments when they are being initially read- retroactive adjustments will not matter as much.
Yeah, I noticed a lot of that - if Eugine was the first person to get to one of my comments, it had a lot higher chance of being downvoted further, even if it was similar to other comments that got upvoted when he didn't get to them until later.
Herd mentality is scary.
I am glad to see this decision.
It is odd, though, that the effect of the banning is apparently to prevent him from doing anything on LW except the conduct for which he was banned. Everyone is a hero to himself, and there is no reason to expect him not to carry on this behaviour while he can. I hope to see a technical resolution of this in the near future. I am surprised that access to his account was not simply removed. That is what banning seems to have meant in the past.
As for his past votes, reverting every one of them would be the simplest action. The collateral damage of removing such legitimate signal as there was in his other votes is a small price to avoid exercising judgement over every individual case.
I checked my recent comments, because I was planning to say that so far he doesn't seem to have offended after the banning, however I found no evidence of that. The two comments from the last 2 days, which I had noticed did't get any downvotes initially, now had one (as do my other comments). This doesn't prove much, so I checked all the other users who were getting mass downvoted for extended periods (the list in the post) and it seems like all their recent comments had at least 1 downvote as well.
The above is not definite proof, but what I suspect might be happening is that Eugine's bot/script is still running, despite him leaving the site.
I can't help but feel threatening Eugine with a ban might have been better than summarily blocking him for past offenses.
I mean, this is his first time breaking the rules, right? And he can't have known this would be a banning offense before it was declared one. He might well be willing to obey the new edict if given a choice between that and punishment.
Wow, I picked the culprit.
(I have no signed prior statement to prove this, but I certainly guessed it.)
Edit: And there's my points going up already!
Everyone following the situation knew it was Eugine. At least one victim named him publicly. Sometimes he was referred to obliquely as "the person named in the other thread" or something like that, but the people who were following the story knew what that meant.
And I just dropped from 9800ish to 8909. But still at +269 last 30 days. What?
30-day karma counts karma on comments made in the last 30 days, not the delta in your total karma over the last 30 days. It's somewhat counterintuitive, yes.
That doesn't explain what caused David to lose 900 karma points abruptly. (I don't think it can be that all Eugine's votes have been reversed because (1) I'm pretty sure my losses at his hands haven't been undone and (2) I'd be rather surprised if Eugine gave David 900 upvotes in the history of ever. Not least because that would mean 10% of David's karma is upvotes from Eugine.)
Oh, I thought that went without saying -- elsewhere in the thread, several of the people that have been targeted for block downvotes have said that they've continued, so chances are David's having the same problem. I was only trying to explain the difference between the changes in his total and 30-day karma.
Oh, I see. But the usual pattern of block-downvoting has been much less abrupt than that. (In my case it was, I think, somewhere in the range of 1-10 downvotes per day while it was happening.)
I suppose it's possible that Eugine is trying to do as much damage as he can before his ability to downvote finally goes away, but that seems obviously pointless (it's just asking to have all his votes reversed) so I'd guess it's someone else. This seems like a particularly stupid time to be engaging in obnoxious downvoting patterns, though -- much more likely to get caught, probably more likely to get slapped down hard for it.
First, I'm not sure if I agree with the ban, but I would allow EN to post one last apologia at least.
Second, considering karma as a property of users rather than of comments is toxic. Let's stop it. Let's consider the sum of all comments and post that happen to be written by the same person no more meaningful than the sum of all comments and post that happen to be posted the same day.
If we must rank users, e.g. to decide whom to allow to post articles, let's have a system where users can rate each other directly (but anonymously). Maybe make higher-ranked users' ratings count more (i.e. each user's score is proportional to the component of the eigenvector of the matrix of ratings with the largest eigenvalue).
If he sends it by e-mail to Kaj, I am sure Kaj would publish it (using Kaj's account).
A game I used to work on did something like this to gate content that was considered more advanced or more susceptible to balance problems. It caused an astonishing amount of drama between users and didn't seem to work very well as a gatekeeping mechanism.
I'm against it, pending details.
It may be interesting to have comment rank be the sum of positive and negative votes, while user rank counts only the positive votes.
I'd personally like that, and think it's a great point.
Where we disagree is much more interesting than where we agree. That's where we can really learn something.
Thank you. That's all I ask.
Is this a criticism of Eugine or a criticism of others for neglecting their duty? I don't know all of those users but in some cases the only way Eugine could have been "overwhelmingly" the biggest downvoter is if all the people with decent standards realised they had better things to do than fix people wrong on the internet.
Or if no-one else thought that botvoting of people was a good idea. Or did Eugine manually perform all those downvotes himself? Where were his standards when he downvoted the good and neutral as well as the bad?
With all the karma talk, all sorts of interesting analyses pop into my head.
What are the karma stats when A replies to B? Upvotes, downvotes, totals, percentage upvote, and how do the karma stats of the initial posts correlate with the replies? And that's all just using anonymous karma votes.
So, I am curious about the new legal regime on LW :-/
It seems that the rule "karma vote the post, not the user" has been made explicit and the breaking of it is a bannable offence now. Is that so?
Let's say I think user X is a troll, and idiot, and a disgrace and so should be encouraged to remove himself from LW. Can I use karma voting to express my attitude? Let's say it's a new user who posts a lot, so at pretty much every post of his I facepalm and downvote. Is that fine? In a couple of months it will look like I mass-downvoted him (and under some definitions of "mass-downvoting" I did).
Now, I'm far to lazy to downvote all posts I don't like (or to write a script to do it). But it's conceivable that one day someone will annoy me enough to downvote a bunch of his posts. Is it a bannable offence now?
Downvoting someone's all posts because all of the posts are genuinely bad is fine; downvoting them all (even the good ones) because the person just happens to annoy you in general is not.
Of course telling the two cases apart can be difficult, so in practice people won't be banned unless it looks particularly obvious that they are engaging in indiscriminate mass-downvoting.
I am puzzled by the technological limits suggested in this post.
Can an administrator not change the password on a user's account?
If so, a solution would be to change Eugine's password to something Eugine doesn't know. Eugine could then not log on and would not be able to either post or upvote/downvote other users.
It appears to be a cross between a lack of manpower and a truly terrible codebase and data structures. (I haven't looked at either myself, for much the same reasons I've so far successfully avoided Two Girls One Cup.)
Great job Kaj and Jackk, congrats!
I hope this sets a good enough precedent that this won't be needed again; Eugine had plenty of warning both that this was frowned upon by pretty much everybody, and that he could be identified.
I don't think this actually makes sense. Generally the way a group comes to a decision something is for a few individuals to come to believe it, and then they convince others. If individuals are not allowed to decide, it's unclear how any weeding can ever be decided upon. Indeed, it's unclear if this rule would even allow you Kaj to ban Eugine!
Pattern A: Someone writes a stupid comment. I downvote the comment, you downvote the comment, Eugine downvotes the comment. The comment now has -3 karma, and the user lost 3 karma. If they continue writing stupid comments, their karma will drop to zero.
Pattern B: Someone writes a stupid comment, I go berserk and downvote all their 30 comments and 2 articles. The user lost 50 karma.
The difference is that in Pattern A, it was individuals making the decision, but it took more than one individual to sent a strong signal. Also, the signals were connected to comments: if the user wrote ten smart comments and ten stupid comments, they would see the difference. Thus, they can learn.
Having more rights than an average user is pretty much the definition of a moderator.
This solution does not seem scalable: it is going to require an amount of moderator effort proportional to the number of crazy people the site attracts.
We're a growing site, but we're not growing that fast, especially in the last year or so. Historically we seem to have attracted a crank every few months or so, which should be handleable by a mod staff of any size so long as it actually, you know, moderates stuff. At linear growth rates that should hold for years, longer if the mods are willing to name new mods from time to time.
Tracking excessive downvoting seems like something that can be pretty well automated.
Part of this solution is that it has a deterrence effect. That doesn't need much moderator effort. That said, if the forum grows there isn't much of a problem with recruiting additional moderators.