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Kaj_Sotala comments on [moderator action] Eugine_Nier is now banned for mass downvote harassment - Less Wrong Discussion
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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?
The report jackk gave me doesn't, at least. I don't know whether that information would be available aomewhere.
Followup: So will you take the actions I suggested? They seem pretty simple and easy and I can't think of why you wouldn't do them if your true reason is doubt.
Thank you :)
The main reason is that digging up the information about the specific downvotes would be more work for jackk and I'm not sure how burdened he is with the work that he's already doing. (Also more work for me.) But I'll ask him once he gets done with the current stuff he's doing for this whole thing.
Have you asked him? It's been a couple months now. TIA.
No, I'm sorry. You could ask Viliam_Bur to do it.
I did, but why not? I have a hypothesis but it's not very flattering to you.
General ughy feelings around doing anything related to downvote investigations and an unwillingness to do anything that would cause me to spend more time doing them. Possible reasons for those ughy feelings include an aversion to doing anything confrontational (including punishing mass downvoters), a high uncertainty of what should be considered unacceptable behavior and low confidence in my ability to accurately determine what counts as karmassassination, and an unwillingness to bother people (including jackk) unless absolutely necessary. Not all of those reasons necessarily applied in your case, but it was close enough to trigger the emotional association.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the persons who downvoted me a lot have significantly more popular views than those of Eugine_Nier.
Then what I would do is this: First, ask if there is a record of the time of the downvotes. If there were a large number over a short time period, you can be very confident that it's karmassassination.
If that information isn't available, then just look at my posts which were downvoted by Senor 150 and compare it to my actual chronological posting history. If there is a long string of chronologically uninterrupted downvotes, you can be very confident that it's karmassassination.