My memory is very far from perfect, but I don't remember there ever being much support for downvoting "bad" users into oblivion. Do you have a couple of links, perhaps? In any case, what Lumifer wrote was "When good guys do that it's called karma system working as intended" and not "A few years ago, some people on LW were in favour of good guys doing that", which seems to me a very different proposition indeed.
There was a -lot- of defense of this during Eugine's ban
I'm just looking through the comments to the announcement of Eugine's ban. There are a lot of comments. So far, the only instance I can find of someone defending mass-downvoting in some cases is ... Lumifer.
... OK, there are a couple more: wedrifid suggesting it might be an appropriate treatment for trollish sockpuppets and MugaSofer not actually defending mass-downvoting but saying that some (unspecified) people think it is sometimes justified.
... And, having now finished (though I confess I skimmed some subthreads that didn't seem likely to contain opinions on this point), that's all I found. So we have Lumifer defending his right (in principle) to mass-downvote someone he thinks is a hopeless case; wedrifid suggesting that mass-downvoting might be an appropriate sanction for trollish sockpuppets and the like; and MugaSofer saying that some people think mass-downvoting is sometimes OK; and that's it. That's in a thread of hundreds of comments, a large fraction of which either explicitly say what an ugly thing mass-downvoting is or implicitly agree with the general sentiment.
That doesn't look to me like "a -lot- of defense". Maybe I looked in the wrong place. Again, do you have a link or two?
I cannot provide links, unfortunately, no, because most of it happened in background threads, although MugaSofer's comment can be taken as confirmation that this was, in fact, being talked about. This was a... semi-popular topic on how Less Wrong could be improved around that time, when I happened to be unusually active, although I left in disgust right before Eugine's ban, IIRC, over the fact that my most upvoted comments were what I considered basic-level social sanity, and the stuff I wrote that I expected to be taken seriously tended to get downvoted ...
Thanks to the reaction to this article and some conversations, I'm convinced that it's worth trying to renovate and restore LW. Eliezer, Nate, and Matt Fallshaw are all on board and have empowered me as an editor to see what we can do about reshaping LW to meet what the community currently needs. This involves a combination of technical changes and social changes, which we'll try to make transparently and non-intrusively.
Technical Changes
Changes will be tracked as issues on the LW issue tracker here. Volunteer contributions very welcome and will be rewarded with karma, and if you'd like to be paid for spending a solid block of high-priority time on this get in touch with me. If you'd like to help, for now I recommend setting up a dev environment (as laid out here and here).
Some technical changes (links to the issues in the issue tracker):
--Nick_Tarleton
This is something I care about quite a bit! Ideally, the three people above would scrutinize every change and determine whether or not it's worthwhile. In practice, they're all extremely busy, and as I'm only very busy I've been deputized to handle whether or not change will be accepted. If you're unsure about a change, talk to me.
Trike still maintains the site, and so it's still a Trike dev's call when a change will make its way to production (or if it's too buggy to accept). We've got a turnaround time guarantee from Matt for any time-sensitive changes (which I imagine few changes will be).
Social Changes
The rationalist community is a different beast than it was years ago, and many people have shifted away from Less Wrong. Bringing them back needs to involve more than asking nicely, or the same problems will appear again.
Epistemic rationality will remain a core focus of LessWrong, and the sorts of confusion that you find elsewhere will continue to not fly here. But the forces that push people from Main to Discussion to Open Threads to other sites need to be explicitly counteracted.
One aspect is that just like emotion is part of rationality, informality is part of the rationalist community.
--Alicorn
Another aspect is dealing with the deepening and specializing interests of the community.
A third aspect is focusing on effective communication. One of the core determinants of professional and personal success is being able to communicate challenging topics and emotions effectively with other humans. The applications for both instrumental and epistemic rationality are clear, and explicitly seeking to cultivate this skill without losing the commitment to rationality will both make LW a more pleasant place to visit and (one hopes) allow LWers to win more in their lives. But this is a long project, whose details this paragraph is too short to contain. I don't have a current anticipated date for when I'll be ready to talk more about this.
I expect to edit this post over the coming days, and as I do, I'll make comments to highlight the changes. Thanks for reading!