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ChristianKl comments on [moderator action] Eugine_Nier is now banned for mass downvote harassment - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (366)
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.
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.
Some people describe that as improving the signal to noise ratio. A good many, I believe.
Likely he's the hero of his own story, and believes he has nothing to apologize for. Never had that lesson in losing against those with power over you.