Begging your pardon, but I know the behavior you're referring to; what concerns me with the increased ability to detect this behavior is the lack of a concrete definition for what the behavior is. That's a recipe for disaster.

A concrete definition does enable "rule-lawyering", but then we can have a fuzzy area at the boundary of the rules, which is an acceptable place for fuzziness, and narrow enough that human judgment at its worst won't deviate too far from fair. I/e, for a nonexistent rule, we could make a rule against downvoting more than ten of another user's comments in an hour, and then create a trigger that goes off at 8 or 9 (at which point maybe the user gets flagged, and sufficient flags trigger a moderator to take a look), to catch those who rule-lawyer, and another that goes off at 10 and immediately punishes the infractor (maybe with a 100 karma penalty) while still letting people know what behavior is acceptable and unacceptable.

To give a specific real-world case, I had a user who said they were downvoting every comment I wrote in a particular post, and encouraged other users to do the same, on the basis that they didn't like what I had done there, and didn't want to see anything like it ever again. (I do not want something to be done about that, to be clear, I'm using it as an example.) Would we say that's against the rules, or no? To be clear, nobody went through my history or otherwise downvoted anything that wasn't in that post - but this is the kind of situation you need explicit rules for.

Rules should also have explicit punishments. I think karma penalties are probably fair in most cases, and more extreme measures only as necessary.

What are we calling retributive downvoting, incidentally?

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.

I think it would be good to have a limit of posts/per/day for people with karma <70% when there there are >10 votes cast on their posts.

Being optimistic is not the same thing as living in denail and ignoring reality. Telling yourself only great thing is likely to make you not be in touch with reality.

That said, there's probably a sweet spot.

I don't think that's a good model. You can be fully in touch with reality and be optimistic through exercises like doing a lot of gratitude journaling.

Living in denail isn't helpful for success.

Here's the data.

As for reasons, I can only offer some speculation since I'm 0/2 on being hot and/or a woman. First of all, I also spend a non-negligible amount of time on my appearance and I like people who are into my humor/intellect/interests/personality and not my looks. Commenting on appearance can also seem vulgar or indicate that you're only looking for sex. Finally, good looking women get complimented on their looks a lot, and not very beautiful women may be insecure about their appearance and question the sincerity of your compliments. I think this applies not just on OkCupid but in most online and offline situations.

Again, just speculating.

There's a difference: on OKC you can filter people based on whatever, in non-OKC situations you don't have that information available to you. I only have the woman's looks (and the women have a perv-o-meter) to notice.

Re-reading your article I think a better way to describe this is "approaches with comparative advantages" and "approaches without comparative advantages".

Well, I was one of those "previously good posters" (top 10 for a long time) and I left because of the decline in quality. I don't remember exactly, but I think Eliezer also claimed to leave because of nastiness in the comments, not because people were asking him to be more rigorous.

The limiting factor of having an active community on LW is people's desire to hang out here. I strongly believe that desire depends mostly on the average quality of posts they read, and doesn't depend on their freedom to post. Eliezer had a fandom even in the OB days, when no one except him could post at all. Only Scott can post on SSC today, yet each of his posts gathers hundreds of comments. I'm just suggesting the same model here.

See e.g. Georgia's election to Congress in 2014 -- seven out of 14 Congressmen ran (and won) unopposed. Or Massachusetts -- six out of nine unopposed.

There are also hereditary fiefdoms -- e.g. Newark, NJ.

Correcting the problem is required, but its expected efficiency is way lower than solving it. Or, sometimes, even just tolerating it.

For example, we've just had regional elections, and in the village where I live, there was exactly one candidate to choose from. Problem? Yes. Anybody really against it? No.