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Nornagest comments on Upcoming LW Changes - Less Wrong Discussion
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The targeted harassment of one user by another user to punish disagreement; letting disagreements on one topic spill over into disagreements on all topics.
That is, if someone has five terrible comments on politics and five mediocre comments on horticulture, downvoting all five politics comments could be acceptable but downvoting all ten is troubling, especially if it's done all at once. (In general, don't hate-read.)
Another way to think about this is that we want to preserve large swings in karma as signals of community approval or disapproval, rather than individuals using long histories to magnify approval or disapproval. It's also problematic to vote up everything someone else has written because you really like one of their recent comments, and serial vote detection algorithms also target that behavior.
We typically see this as sockpuppets instead of serial upvoters, because when someone wants to abuse the karma system they want someone else's total / last thirty days to be low, and they want a particular comment's karma to be high, and having a second account upvote everything they've ever done isn't as useful for the latter.
The cheapest technical fix would probably be to prohibit voting on a comment after some time has passed, like some subreddits do. This would prevent karma gain from "interest" on old comments, but that probably wouldn't be too big a deal. More importantly, though, it wouldn't prevent ongoing retributive downvoting, which Eugine did (sometimes? I was never targeted) engage in -- only big one-time karma moves.
If we're looking for first steps, though, this is a place to start.
If you want to reward having a long history of comments, you could prohibit only downvoting of old comments.
I doubt you could algorithmically distinguish between downvoting a horticulture post because of disagreements about horticulture and downvoting a horticulture post because of disagreements about some other topic.
But I suspect voting rate limiters should keep the problem in check.