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Lumifer comments on [moderator action] Eugine_Nier is now banned for mass downvote harassment - Less Wrong Discussion
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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 don't know what that means.
As an example, consider this recent spat.
The reason the (far away over the internet) person annoys me is because his posts annoy me. Can I downvote them? In large numbers? The great majority of that user's posts?
In grading terms, you're thinking in terms of grading on a curve and I'm thinking in terms of grading on an absolute basis.
By the way, making it so that no one can downvote a post more than a couple of months old (but can upvote it) is one way to solve or at least mitigate the karmassasination issue.
I guess a simple test would be: "if I saw this post and didn't know who had written it, would I still downvote it?". If yes, then it's fine, even if you did do the downvoting in large numbers. Because you'd be making your decision based on the quality of the specific comment rather than e.g. a general dislike of the person's other comments.
(This heuristic isn't quite perfect, given that knowing the writer of a comment does sometimes provide information that helps evaluate the comment better - e.g. if there's someone who I know to have a background in physics and they tell me that I'm wrong about a question of physics, I have more reason to take that seriously than if the comment came from the Time Cube guy. But the rough idea should be helpful anyway, I hope.)
As for the question of "how do I tell whether someone really has applied that test"... well, I have some thoughts about that, but I'm not sure whether it's a good idea to give a detailed explanation of the methodology, since that would allow people to game whatever tests I have in mind.