Comment on Open Thread May 2 - May 8, 2016

Thu, 05 May 2016 14:24:44 GMT

I don't think he's targeting me because you riled him up; I've been on his list for ages. It's possible that he's got more aggressive lately because you annoyed him, but it could also be e.g. because he's had a lot of his identities banhammered lately.

It doesn't look to me as if he's targeting Nancy in general; I think he's downvoting negative things said about him, and it happens that many of them are from Nancy. (For the obvious reason.)

that is likely to produce administrative response

Eugine's original ban was for mass-downvoting. All subsequent action against him has been more because he keeps coming back despite his ban. I have never yet seen any administrative response that actually has any impact on his mass-downvoting. I assume this is, at least in part, because dealing with that requires more difficult investigation (grovelling through LW's horrible database structure trying to figure out who's voted how on what, searching out sockpuppets, etc.) and the people with technical custody of LW are time-starved.

(I wonder occasionally whether the most effective way to deal with the Eugine problem is to find a security hole that makes it possible to filch the LW database files, which could then be analysed without having to go via Trike. I am fairly sure that with actual direct access to the data, it would be pretty easy to identify all of Eugine's socks and what votes they've cast. At the very least they could then be terminated with extreme prejudice; undoing all their votes might require writing a bit of code and therefore another Trike interaction. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not in fact proposing to hack LW in such a fashion. Not in the near future, anyway.)

It decided to maul the dragon in response.

I dunno. My mental model of Nancy is that she isn't the sort to switch from inaction to action just because she starts being personally targeted.

[EDITED to add:] By "inaction" I don't mean "doing literally nothing", I mean "neither stopping nor undoing the karmabuse". The moderators are clearly being fairly active in slapping down visible Eugine accounts.

Discuss