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Viliam comments on Rationality Quotes Thread August 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: bbleeker 03 August 2015 09:50AM

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Comment author: Lumifer 22 August 2015 07:41:36PM 0 points [-]

he's actively trying to drive away people for disagreeing with his politics

No, I don't think so.

In the context of online debates, "actively trying to drive away" means things like threats, discussion of sexual inadequacies, and expressed desires for someone to die in a fire. That is not the case here.

And people who are that sensitive to their karma score are unlikely to be comfortable in LW anyway.

Comment author: Viliam 23 August 2015 08:45:30AM 10 points [-]

And people who are that sensitive to their karma score are unlikely to be comfortable in LW anyway.

There is a huge difference between mass downvoting happening to an experienced user or to a new user. The experienced user has a lot of karma to waste; and they also have a long history of feedback that their contributions are welcomed by the community. The new user will more likely evaluate the feedback incorrectly (as a dislike by community, as opposed to by a single user who happens to be not representative of the community), and in extreme cases can even lose the ability to post.

My main concern is the abuse of downvotes against new users, which happened in the past, and where in most cases we will never know it happened, because the new users will disappear without giving feedback to the community.

Comment author: Lumifer 24 August 2015 02:42:06AM 3 points [-]

As I mentioned before, this is a technical problem that should have a technical solution.

The relevant political question is how do we get the ability to do something about the code base of LW.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 28 August 2015 03:26:24AM 0 points [-]

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an efficient way to get information about karma voting patterns.

Comment author: gjm 28 August 2015 09:35:18AM 0 points [-]

An inefficient way would do. But maybe "shockingly inefficient" is as good as it gets. The Reddit database architecture (which IIRC LW uses) is ... unusual.