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Viliam_Bur comments on [meta] New LW moderator: Viliam_Bur - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (51)
Thanks for the trust! I hope my services will not be necessary, but I'm here if they are. Feel free to send me a message, but please have a patience if I don't respond quickly, because it's all new to me.
Hi, so did you look into the mass down-voting I was hit with a while back?
I've been patient, it's been 3 months since my last message. Have you had a chance to look into the mass down-voting I was hit with a while back?
Sorry for the delay. You were not downvoted by Eugine_Nier / Azathoth123 (nor by any other single individual), and the pattern of downvotes to you was not similar to how other people were mass-downvoted. Downvotes of you were much more evenly distributed among voters.
This per se does not exclude the possibility of motivated downvoting, but that would have to be someone else, using a different modus operandi. (I tried to develop a finer technique to detect "artificial" voting patterns, but I didn't finish it.)
Are you sure? I recall losing lots of karma points in one period over a few hours, right after an unpleasant confrontation with a couple other posters.
ETA:
Who downvoted these three posts, my hypothesis is that it is the same person or persons.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1s4/open_thread_february_2010_part_2/1myj
http://lesswrong.com/lw/i4/belief_in_belief/1mbj
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ir/you_be_the_jury_survey_on_a_current_event/1bnt
At the moment I am reading this, there seem to be no votes (no upvotes, no downvotes) on two of those three comments:
At least this is how I interpret "0 points, 0% positive". If someone would downvote it, it would not be 0% positive.
Correct. (Of course it's possible that someone downvoted those comments and then removed the downvotes later.)
The way LW displays votes is a bit strange. From the points total and the %positive, you can deduce the numbers of up and down votes in all cases except for "0 points, 50% positive", from which you can tell only that there were some positive number of upvotes and the same number of downvotes. (Well ... if the numbers are really large then the rounding-to-integer of the percentages gets in the way a little.)
I think that given (1) the usually-small number of total votes and (2) the generally high level of numeracy of the LW readership, the only disadvantage to changing from "1 point, 67% positive" to "+2 -1" is that it would require someone actually to make the change, and there are very few Round Tuits[1] available for that task.
[1] "Oh yes, that's a good idea. I'll do it when I get a round tuit." I have seen shops selling Round Tuits. Unfortunately they don't actually generate increased motivation or spare time.
Or perhaps to make it easy to read: "1 point" with "+2 -1" in the tooltip.
Sorry, yes, that was what I actually had in mind.
My recollection is that at that time, a comment started with one point and you ended up with 0 points only if someone downvoted you. You disagree with this?
Scores have always started at 0.
Reddit does it the way that you are describing, with scores starting at 1, but Less Wrong has never done it that way.
Ok, maybe I confused the karma system here with that of Reddit.
I've heard it used to be that way, but when I first joined LW around 2011 (under a different account than this one) comments already started from zero, and the tooltip with the % positive wasn't implemented until much later (around 2013 IIRC).
Yes, I agree with this. Anyway, the bottom line is this:
I am very confident that I was karmassasinated or whatever you want to call it. Because I clearly remember having a heated exchange with a couple other posters and right afterwards my karma score dropped a huge amount in a short time, I checked and it was clear that one or more people went back and downvoted lots and lots of my posts in a short span of time.
Apart from my own observations, there is decent evidence that this happened -- otherwise I would not have been mentioned in the earlier thread on this subject.
Viliam_Bur seems quite hostile to any suggestion that it happened to me, it seems he is looking for reasons to deny or downplay it.
The obvious explanation for this is that it's political. The one poster who was banned had politically unpopular views. As I recall, the issue I was karma-killed over was one where I had taken the politically unpopular view.
I do not lose sleep over my karma score or even care about it that much, but what I loath is when politics informs peoples' judgment like this, especially on a discussion board where people are supposed to be on the lookup for this type of behavior.
And so after seven months of being absent from LW you pop up to remind everyone how you were karmassasinated and implying that the moderator was fine with that...
Pretty much. Do you think there's a contradiction there?
Implying that political considerations were more important. I have a feeling that the persons who did it are more popular than the fellow who was banned over this stuff.
Thanks for stepping up!
One proactive action a mod could take is to figure out the forum ethics, make it explicit and summarize it in a post, so that people could refer to it and refer others to it. This way if there is an argument, the participants could check their actions against the explicit written norms. In my experience a forum ethics is some combination of consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics. Some examples from other forums:
Admittedly, this forum has been working reasonably well without explicit guidelines, and a discussion of forum ethics might be a net negative, so maybe one should leave well enough alone.
Several of the high-quality forums* I read explicitly (ha) do not have formal rules; the rationale being that having them written down enables the antisocial behavior of doing the worst thing that's still within the rules. However, these forums also have attentive and active moderators (as opposed to silent-except-when-things-go-seriously-wrong moderators) who speak up to discourage bad patterns early, which is not the case for Less Wrong and probably can't be made the case.
* forums in the general sense, not in the genre-of-web-site sense.
I consider my role to be a cop, not a lawgiver. Describing forum ethics is not a part of my job. We already have tools to enforce the things you said: if someone writes stupid comments, spoilers, or trolling comments, anyone can downvote them. My superpowers will be needed if someone starts abusing these tools, e.g. by mass downvoting, because that's what other users cannot investigate.
What I said is orthogonal to whether having explicit debate about forum ethics is good or bad. I can imagine it going either way. I think most people would agree with the examples you gave here. Anyone should feel equally free to initate this kind of debate, and my opinion should have no special weight there. Opinions of people from MIRI or CFAR should have extra weight, I think, but I am not in that set.
Right, As long as you know what laws to enforce.