You know what, you're putting it as if I'm doing this for my personal gratification and to the detriment of LW as a whole, when it's exactly the reverse. I could have saved loads of karma just by not posting this, which I did in fact anticipate (to be honest, I anticipated a score hovering around zero karma or 50%). It's not my fault that moderation doesn't seem to be enough of a concern around here for the website to have a well set up infrastructure for reporting, communicating with mods, displaying mod status etc., and when somebody intends to solve such a problem, one has to do it publicly. It's not easy, or pleasant, and it draws undue attention upon myself rather than the situation. I'm not expecting congratulations, but do you image I like getting flak for pointing out all the shit someone else does?
But I don't think anything would have gotten done otherwise. Not only because the problem might not register as important unless there's public support; but also because, when the situation is uncertain and it takes a third party intervention to just check out who downvotes who, the key to the problem might need to be crowdsourced (for instance, the fact that Yvain bothered to check the IPs).
Besides, the user in question never came here to defend himself. Only an intervention from him, proving that he was in fact being harmed in some way by what I said in the post, might have made me retract it; it doesn't even matter if he was lying. Not doing so translates to implicit confession of guilt, and to cowardly troll behaviour. Good riddance, then.
To anyone who's worried this sets a bad precedent for dealing with such cases, either you people make LW a Report Post/User button, or increase your resilience to public methods of dealing with rule-breakers. Or face floods of undesirables. Many internet communities have had worse and came out just fine out of the situation.
It's trivially easy to get a new IP address and to avoid, say, "exceeding the quote limits per rationality thread". So what then? You know the evil rule-skirter is still around. It could be nearly anyone.
And mass downvoting, and posting exclusively NRx propaganda, and... mission accomplished!
Life is about skirting rules. Most optimizing comes from skirting rules, in the sense of interpreting them most favorably vis-a-vis your goals.
Go tell that to a mod on any functional, actively moderated community. Or to a judge, for that matter. See how that would fly there.
I know this reeks of witch-hunting, but... I have a hunch that u/Eugine_Nier is back under the guise of u/Azathoth123. Reasons:
I don't have an axe to grind against the guy, I've only spoken to him a couple of times and didn't notice any particularly large karma hits afterwards, I just really dislike it when someone skirts the rules like that. Disruptive users evading permanent bans never helped any community ever.
Obviously I'm posting this here because I think a moderator should look into the matter. Usually I would be posting a disclaimer of some sort, apologizing in advance to Azathoth123 for attacking his standing with slanderous accusations if this turned out not to be the case. Well, I won't. The more I look into the matter, the more confident I get that they're the same person. Azathoth, if you're reading this and you're not Eugine_Nier, then I strongly advise you go search for your twin brother, I think you'll get along very well. Seriously, I'm saying this in good faith. You have a suspiciously great deal of things in common.
If retributive downvoting is (still) a concern (if not, then disregard this paragraph): I'd like to request, if such a thing is possible, that a mod karma-blocks me until the issue is over, so as to not incur undeserved downvotes (it would also mean I'd get no upvotes). In turn, I promise not to abuse the system by spamming the boards with garbage without consequences, but then again given my history so far on LW I don't think that such an abuse should be expected from me. For the record, I could have made a throwaway account just to say this, and not risk being karmassassinated, but 1) a zero karma account has no credibility and 2) for signalling reasons I prefer to put my money where my mouth is.
P.S. I only made this announcement its own post because the latest open thread was about to "expire".