Nancy, I support Scott's (Yvain's) approach. Just say you are a dictator and ban at a whim (or perhaps ban "virtue-ethically" rather than "deontologically" -- "we don't want your type around here.") Publishing rules just invites people to bend them.
Just say you are a dictator and ban at a whim
There is a slight problem in that LW is not Nancy's personal blog to be shaped by her whims.
Voting for a new CEO is dramatically more effective than the board trying to micromanage the current CEO with rules. Find a reasonable person and let them be flexibly reasonable.
You mean people willing to say things likely to be true even if it isn't socially acceptable to admit they are.
People holding similar positions to yours but expressing them in much less dickish ways have included, off the top of my head, Konkvistador (whose total karma is 88% positive), nydwracu (91% positive), Vladimir M (93% positive). Nyan Sandwich and Moss Piglet appear to have deleted their accounts, but I don't recall them being downvoted much either -- nor can I recall many people lamenting the presence of any of said commenters.
For comparison, advancedatheist is 59% positive and sam0345 (most likely James Donald) is 53% positive; also eridu, who expressed radical feminist opinions in a way almost as obnoxious as Jim expresses his, has since deleted his account, but IIRC his % positive was also in the mid 50s.
So no, the social acceptability of a statement does not just depend on its factual content.
Someone has upvoted and downvoted a lot of comments in this thread using this account. I have manually reverted them. Please don't vote using this account.
Please, don't ban anonymous account, there are at least couple people who regularly use it. It is rare that anyone would use it for voting, it was the first time I have logged in and noticed so much upvoting and downvoting in a single thread. Sometimes I find a couple of votes in a thread, and I often revert them, but that's it. Maybe there were previous incidents in the past, but I haven't noticed them. Of course, things like that relies on goodwill. If someone started abusing it, there would be no choice except to ban it.
By the way, thank you Nancy. You do a job that is often unpleasant, but necessary.
Definitely don't unless strong evidence emerges of an actual serious problem. Having an effectively anon account is valuable.
OK. It won't be banned.
I don't know whether it would be possible to make it into a non-voting account, but if so, would that be a good idea?
Nancy, thank you for the hard work you do and the tough calls you have to make. The admin's job is a lonely one, and not sufficiently appreciated. As someone who has done and is currently doing lots of admin stuff, I know that from personal experience. So thank you!
It's hard (at least for me -- YMMV) to read "can't get" (emphasis added; as opposed to e.g. "don't get") in a way that doesn't imply the threat of violence (broadly construed) against women who do try to get sexual experience before marriage. Then again, by such standards proposals to e.g. ban a particular drug would also count as advocacy of violence, so probably EY had something less broad in mind.
Any thoughts about technical solutions to excessive down-voting of past material?
Stack Overflow attempts to discover and reverse serial voting with a script that runs daily. It seems likely we can do a similar thing.
I don't think your band analogy holds. The person is a member of the community that stands or falls by what its members do. In this case, it's a choice between cursing the darkness or turning on the light.
The type of criticism from Brillyant is low effort and fairly useless. Lots of people write one liners bemoaning the decline of LW. What is the point of doing that?
I think that impact of an upvote or a downvote should be inversely proportional to how often that person votes.
I've banned them without prior notice because I'm not giving them more chances to downvote.
I think a "We've observed X. It appears to be bad behavior. Do you have an alternative explanation?" discussion should be started in any case. Otherwise there will be no justice for false positives.
Is the "because I'm not giving them more chances to downvote" a real argument? It won't be if it's technically possible to prohibit downvoting (maybe by temporarily taking away their Karma, so that the Karma-based voting limits would kick in), or if it's possible to eventually retract their (recent) votes, so that current votes won't matter as much.
The user most likely to engage in retributive downvoting are those who engage in hostile debate and subsequently have low karma ratio's themselves (VoiceofRa has 68% favourability). Perhaps you could disable downvoting functionality for those with a karma ratio lower than 80%? Considering that poor quality of contributions is another big factor for low karma ratios this measure would have the added benefit that our most competent users have more power.
Downvotes on posts/comments older than X time affect the downvoters karma the same way as they do the downvoted.
Downvotes made after X time from the original posting affect karma at a rate of y%
Downvotes from users with karma below X don't affect the downvoted's karma score
All of these are made on the assumption that malicious downvoters are engaged in a E-Peen measuring contest using Karma as the measuring tool.
I would rather just make spiteful down-voting impossible
That would require presumably automatic distinguishing between "spiteful" and "non-spiteful" :-/
A very simple solution is to follow Reddit and block any kind of voting on old (="archived") content.
my impression is that highly specific rules like that are an invitation to gaming the rules.
LOL. Would you like to apply this generally, e.g. as in "The principle of Rule of Law is a bad idea because it's an invitation to gaming the laws. Much better to have a tyrant...err... benevolent philosopher-king decide matters because it's harder to game him".
Same technical solution I always offer: An upvote or downvote should add or subtract the number of bits of information conveyed by that vote, conditioned on the identity of the voter and the target.
In the simplest version, this would mean that if person X upvotes or downvotes everything written by person Y, those votes count for nothing. If X upvotes half of every comment by person Y, and never downvotes anything by Y, those votes count for nothing (if we assume X missed the comments he didn't vote on), or up to 1 bit (if we assume X saw all the other comments).
Better would be to use a model that blended X's voting pattern overall with X's voting on Y's posts and comments.
Making voting public would go a long way
...towards LOTS of drama, enemy lists, political intrigue, etc.
Messaging you privately, as my own solution works best if people are unaware of the specifics. (Posting this here to remind others with potential suggestions to consider whether the same issue applies to their ideas.)
LW needs a hero
I agree with you on this, and I think this is an enormous problem. Somehow this need is written into the rationalist DNA, and I think to grow, the rationalist community needs to move past this.
It doesn't matter what Yudkowsky does, it matters what (generic) "you" do. In fact, our good friend Yudkowsky said so himself, more or less, if you don't want to take my word for it.
edit: I think it is also very important to let go of "intelligence" as a single number on your character sheet. That's a really toxic way to think.
+1 for something like "no more than 5 downvotes/week for content which is more than a month old", but be careful that new comment on an old article is not old content.
I'm thinking of something like not letting anyone give more than 5 downvotes/week for content which is more than a month old.
No likey.
People should not be discouraged from actively reading older posts and voting on them. Quite the opposite.
I've gotten sufficient evidence from support that voiceofra has been doing retributive downvoting.
Roughly how many downvotes are we talking here? Seeing a proposed limit of 5 in a week makes me wonder. 5 seems quite low to get exercised about.
People should not be discouraged from actively reading older posts and voting on them. Quite the opposite.
My feeling is that people should be able to reply to older posts. And I think upvoting helps bring attention to good comments and posts. I'm inclined to think that there's enough downvoting in some modest number of months to give an adequate signal.
Voiceofra did over 800 downvotes to just three posters. I'm sick of dealing with this stuff. I want it to not happen. 5 downvotes per week on old posts doesn't seem like a really onerous restrictions, but I don't downvote a tremendous amount, so I might be typical-minding things.
5 downvotes per week is well below trouble, I think. 15 starts looking like karma-vampirism to me if someone is doing a vendetta.
Some people get dispirited if their karma is dropping, especially if there's no apparent reason for it.
If I didn't already trust Nancy, and was unaware of the VoiceOfRa's post/comment history and discussion on his forum behaviour over a long period of time, this post would frighten me.
I think it is better if banning decisions are not made public, even (especially) to the banned user.
The banned user should not notice anything, but their posts, messages, and votes do not appear to anyone else.
I've gotten sufficient evidence from support that voiceofra has been doing retributive downvoting. I've banned them without prior notice because I'm not giving them more chances to downvote.
I'm thinking of something like not letting anyone give more than 5 downvotes/week for content which is more than a month old. The numbers and the time period are tentative-- this isn't my ideal rule. This is probably technically possible. However, my impression is that highly specific rules like that are an invitation to gaming the rules.
I would rather just make spiteful down-voting impossible (or maybe make it expensive) rather than trying to find out who's doing it. Admittedly, putting up barriers to downvoting for past comments doesn't solve the problem of people who down-vote everything, but at least people who downvote current material are easier to notice.
Any thoughts about technical solutions to excessive down-voting of past material?