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Kaj_Sotala comments on [moderator action] Eugine_Nier is now banned for mass downvote harassment - Less Wrong Discussion

107 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 03 July 2014 12:04PM

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Comment author: ialdabaoth 03 July 2014 02:09:43PM *  20 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 03 July 2014 02:17:58PM 15 points [-]

Ah, I see. That's a reasonable request, I'll ask if there's anything that can be done about it.

Comment author: ialdabaoth 03 July 2014 09:13:23PM *  7 points [-]

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:

class VotesByAccount(tdb_cassandra.DenormalizedRelation)

class LinkVotesByAccount(VotesByAccount)

class CommentVotesByAccount(VotesByAccount)

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.