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gjm comments on The Fable of the Burning Branch - Less Wrong Discussion

-19 Post author: EphemeralNight 08 February 2016 03:20PM

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Comment author: TheAltar 09 February 2016 06:34:03PM 1 point [-]

2nd to last paragraph.

Comment author: gjm 10 February 2016 02:50:20AM 0 points [-]

As I write this, the parent comment is at -1 despite the fact that it simply answers a question someone asked. There is something very strange about the voting in this post's comments.

Comment author: entirelyuseless 10 February 2016 04:00:29AM 0 points [-]

Someone downvoted your comment as well. Elsewhere in the thread, username2 asserted that Nancy could not be trusted as a moderator. I am pretty sure that comment was negative before, now it is at +4 with 55% positive. So that looks like some kind of vote manipulation.

Comment author: gjm 10 February 2016 12:12:36PM 2 points [-]

There are some comments on this post where I wonder about vote manipulation because they seem to have changed score rapidly, some considerable time after posting.

TheAltar's comment upthread, and my comment on it, don't seem like examples of that. I think they may be unreasonable downvotes but not improper ones, if you see what I mean. (My reading of the situation is that there are some people on LW who have a strong aversion to anything suggestive of "social justice", and that that's responsible for a lot of the downvotes here. E.g., someone suggests that one bit of the OP is endorsing rape or complaining about people getting punished for rape; vocal opposition to rape is a Social Justice Thing and therefore bad in these people's eyes[1]; and then anything that engages with that without condemning it -- e.g., TheAltar's comment -- is guilty by association.)

[1] How could anyone have a problem with vocal opposition to rape? Well, the idea is that the word "rape" gets attached to things that are not rape (e.g., in phrases like "rape culture", "rape apologist", etc.) and then those things can get smacked down almost as if they were actual rape, even if they don't remotely deserve it.

Comment author: TheAltar 12 February 2016 01:54:30PM -1 points [-]

EphemeralNight and Old_Gold's posts seem to have jumped up in votes massively in the last 1-2 days when they were both in the negative iirc.

Comment author: gjm 12 February 2016 02:42:36PM 2 points [-]

This is a behaviour I have often observed on the scores of comments from Eugine_Nier/Azathoth123/VoiceOfRa/The_Lion. (And, I think, more generally on the scores of "neo-reactionary-friendly" comments[1].) It's tempting to attribute this to Eugine's socks, but it could also be that there are a few people of a particular political persuasion who happen to read LW only every few days, and happen to do so in sync.

It might perhaps be worth noting that Lumifer called out Old_Gold as Eugine redivivus practically as soon as he appeared. Make of that what you will.

[1] I don't like this terminology; perhaps someone can suggest something better. I mean comments that say highly negative things about groups that traditionally have low status but that more recently one is supposed to be positive about and understanding of: those who are female, black, gay, poor, transgender, etc.

Comment author: Dentin 12 February 2016 03:01:29PM 1 point [-]

I suspect it's because infrequent old members like myself only check the site every couple of days. I didn't upvote because the fable was good; I upvoted because I felt the author was being unfairly penalized by the downvoting.

Comment author: TheAltar 12 February 2016 03:34:35PM 3 points [-]

Doubtful. The differences are large, one-sided, and occurred in a cluster. They also don't match LW's general leanings for voters.

Comment author: Viliam 17 February 2016 11:23:05AM 0 points [-]

Old_Gold seems to be Eugine. (My subjective probability is about 70% at this moment.)

EphemeralNight behaves quite differently. If I had to guess, I'd guess that Eugine used his sockpuppets to upvote him.

Comment author: TheAltar 10 February 2016 04:43:57PM *  0 points [-]

I've seen the votes fluctuate and some posts with odd points counts. The karma amounts do seem to be balancing out into what I would generally expect from LW users over time though.

(The entire thread has slowly moved from -22 to -17 which seems odd.)