[I] would like to be able to use karma to honestly appraise the worth of my articles and posts
Simple: You know the pattern of the signal pollution, so for your own purposes, you can easily correct for it.
Edit: Also, “worth” != “popularity within a selected subset of LW readers”, especially if you’d apparently like to construe a correlation as any kind of exact metric. Since you probably know that yourself, your stated reasoning seems a bit like a red herring. What remains is a de facto witchhunt, personal drama celebrated in a public space. Unwarranted, the situation is clear enough: Someone doesn’t like you around, and is expressing that. If your PMs were unsuccessful and you apparently know who it is, do you seriously expect such a veiled public threat of shaming/appeal to work, especially vis-a-vis the risk of further aggravating the situation? If you don’t (which would be the sensible assumption), consider the signal pollution via this very post … count me among those who’ve had their fill of meta posts.
Are you frustrated because you want to see substantive and interesting posts in the discussion section, and not just meta issues? I think you have some common ground with ialdabaoth that you may be missing.
Here we have a valued and contributing member of the community who is frustrated with their recent experience and is reaching out to the rest of us for help. Your response sounds like a your-problem-is-not-a-problem solution. Couldn’t someone make the same kind of reply to you? (e.g. “If you don’t like meta-posts, just skip them. This one was even clearly labeled as meta!”)
Currently, as far as I’m aware, LessWrong doesn’t have any place other than Discussion to discuss meta issues. Perhaps one is needed?
I agree that that particular reason doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny, but I disagree that all that remains is a de facto witchhunt and personal drama celebrated in a public space. The kind of behavior ialdabaoth is calling out can exact a toll on the community beyond just messing up the karma signal. It suggests a kind of passive-aggressive hostility that a lot of people find very unpleasant, unpleasant enough that they might think it not worth their while to be part of a group where they have to deal with it. When you’re a participant in a community, and someone within it is behaving like a jerk in a manner that could drive away valuable contributors, I think it’s a good idea to call out said jerk (assuming private requests to stop the jerky behavior fail).
It is perhaps worth remembering that the original stated purpose of downvotes was to allow LW users to weed out low-quality contributions/contributors in an egalitarian fashion (that is, without the need for privileged users to perform privileged acts of weeding).
Consider an egalitarian mechanism X that allows a community to keep out low-quality contributors. The only way I can think of for such a community to prevent a rogue agent A from using X to keep out high-quality contributors is to ensure that the bulk of the community can tell the difference, agrees on the difference, and is prepared to use X accordingly. Once the community has reached the point where the amount of X-use A can invoke in a particular area is a significant fraction of the total amount of X-use the community as a whole invokes in that area (for example, if A bulk-downvotes user B, and the net downvotes thus created are a significant fraction of the total votes for B), X will predictably fail to keep out low-quality contributors. (Shortly past that point, X will predictably start to be used to keep out high-quality contributors.)
The discussion thus far has mostly de-facto agreed to this, and is therefore taking it for granted that egalitarian mechanisms won’t cut it anymore… admins have to step in and clean things up. Which I in some theoretical sense agree with, though as with all such “someone else ought to do a bunch of extra work!” solutions, I don’t especially feel entitled to benefit from its implementation.
Your comment seems to be an exception, though, which is interesting.
If I’m understanding you correctly, your position is that since downvoting has been corrupted we need a new egalitarian mechanism, such as calling out jerks, and that if we all use that mechanism reliably we can clean up the community.
Which leads me to ask: once we establish that convention, and rogue agents therefore start (incorrectly) calling out valuable contributors for being jerks, what ought we do then?
If I’m understanding you correctly, your position is that since downvoting has been corrupted we need a new egalitarian mechanism, such as calling out jerks, and that if we all use that mechanism reliably we can clean up the community.
Well, not exactly. I’m not proposing “calling out jerks” as an alternative to downvoting as a mechanism for weeding out low-quality contributions. I’m saying that there are different kinds of contributions to the community that we want to discourage. We want to discourage poor-quality comments, of course, and I still think downvoting is a decent (not perfect, but decent) way of doing that. I don’t think the block-downvoting we’ve seen so far changes that.
But we also want to discourage harmful contributions that don’t come in the form of poor comments. Passive-aggressive voting behavior is a harmful contribution to this community, in so far as it jeopardizes the “community” aspect. Voluntary communities should, on balance, be pleasant places to be in, at least for the kind of people the community wants. Block-downvoting makes the community a less pleasant place (to the extent, apparently, that it has already de facto driven out one valuable contributor) without any significant countervailing benefit.
The karma mechanism was not designed to prevent this kind of harmful contribution, and I was saying that in the absence of a formal method to discourage it, calling out particularly egregious offenders might be a reasonable strategy. Of course, it remains to be seen whether it will have any impact, but I think there’s a non-negligible chance that it will. I would much prefer seeing one of the formal mechanisms proposed on this thread being implemented, but I think the chance of this happening in the near future is small.
Which leads me to ask: once we establish that convention, and rogue agents therefore start (incorrectly) calling out valuable contributors for being jerks, what ought we do then?
I think there are a number of signs we can use to ascertain the credibility of a call-out. If a call-out doesn’t appear credible, down-vote it and explain why you don’t find it credible. If an agent is making a habit out of calling out people, down-vote him/her and perhaps express your displeasure. If calling out becomes undesirably common, start discouraging the behavior in general, without regard to the credibility of the call-out.
Has anyone tried making a script for this? Something that would compute some kind of “synthetic karma” so that I can easily see which of my comments were “genuinely” downvoted, which were caught in the crossfire of a mass-downvote, and which set someone off on a mass-downvote?
Simple: You know the pattern of the signal pollution, so for your own purposes, you can easily correct for it.
Edit: Also, “worth” != “popularity within a selected subset of LW readers”, especially if you’d apparently like to construe a correlation as any kind of exact metric. Since you probably know that yourself, your stated reasoning seems a bit like a red herring. What remains is a de facto witchhunt, personal drama celebrated in a public space. Unwarranted, the situation is clear enough: Someone doesn’t like you around, and is expressing that. If your PMs were unsuccessful and you apparently know who it is, do you seriously expect such a veiled public threat of shaming/appeal to work, especially vis-a-vis the risk of further aggravating the situation? If you don’t (which would be the sensible assumption), consider the signal pollution via this very post … count me among those who’ve had their fill of meta posts.
Are you frustrated because you want to see substantive and interesting posts in the discussion section, and not just meta issues? I think you have some common ground with ialdabaoth that you may be missing.
Here we have a valued and contributing member of the community who is frustrated with their recent experience and is reaching out to the rest of us for help. Your response sounds like a your-problem-is-not-a-problem solution. Couldn’t someone make the same kind of reply to you? (e.g. “If you don’t like meta-posts, just skip them. This one was even clearly labeled as meta!”)
Currently, as far as I’m aware, LessWrong doesn’t have any place other than Discussion to discuss meta issues. Perhaps one is needed?
I agree that that particular reason doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny, but I disagree that all that remains is a de facto witchhunt and personal drama celebrated in a public space. The kind of behavior ialdabaoth is calling out can exact a toll on the community beyond just messing up the karma signal. It suggests a kind of passive-aggressive hostility that a lot of people find very unpleasant, unpleasant enough that they might think it not worth their while to be part of a group where they have to deal with it. When you’re a participant in a community, and someone within it is behaving like a jerk in a manner that could drive away valuable contributors, I think it’s a good idea to call out said jerk (assuming private requests to stop the jerky behavior fail).
It is perhaps worth remembering that the original stated purpose of downvotes was to allow LW users to weed out low-quality contributions/contributors in an egalitarian fashion (that is, without the need for privileged users to perform privileged acts of weeding).
Consider an egalitarian mechanism X that allows a community to keep out low-quality contributors. The only way I can think of for such a community to prevent a rogue agent A from using X to keep out high-quality contributors is to ensure that the bulk of the community can tell the difference, agrees on the difference, and is prepared to use X accordingly. Once the community has reached the point where the amount of X-use A can invoke in a particular area is a significant fraction of the total amount of X-use the community as a whole invokes in that area (for example, if A bulk-downvotes user B, and the net downvotes thus created are a significant fraction of the total votes for B), X will predictably fail to keep out low-quality contributors. (Shortly past that point, X will predictably start to be used to keep out high-quality contributors.)
The discussion thus far has mostly de-facto agreed to this, and is therefore taking it for granted that egalitarian mechanisms won’t cut it anymore… admins have to step in and clean things up. Which I in some theoretical sense agree with, though as with all such “someone else ought to do a bunch of extra work!” solutions, I don’t especially feel entitled to benefit from its implementation.
Your comment seems to be an exception, though, which is interesting.
If I’m understanding you correctly, your position is that since downvoting has been corrupted we need a new egalitarian mechanism, such as calling out jerks, and that if we all use that mechanism reliably we can clean up the community.
Which leads me to ask: once we establish that convention, and rogue agents therefore start (incorrectly) calling out valuable contributors for being jerks, what ought we do then?
Well, not exactly. I’m not proposing “calling out jerks” as an alternative to downvoting as a mechanism for weeding out low-quality contributions. I’m saying that there are different kinds of contributions to the community that we want to discourage. We want to discourage poor-quality comments, of course, and I still think downvoting is a decent (not perfect, but decent) way of doing that. I don’t think the block-downvoting we’ve seen so far changes that.
But we also want to discourage harmful contributions that don’t come in the form of poor comments. Passive-aggressive voting behavior is a harmful contribution to this community, in so far as it jeopardizes the “community” aspect. Voluntary communities should, on balance, be pleasant places to be in, at least for the kind of people the community wants. Block-downvoting makes the community a less pleasant place (to the extent, apparently, that it has already de facto driven out one valuable contributor) without any significant countervailing benefit.
The karma mechanism was not designed to prevent this kind of harmful contribution, and I was saying that in the absence of a formal method to discourage it, calling out particularly egregious offenders might be a reasonable strategy. Of course, it remains to be seen whether it will have any impact, but I think there’s a non-negligible chance that it will. I would much prefer seeing one of the formal mechanisms proposed on this thread being implemented, but I think the chance of this happening in the near future is small.
I think there are a number of signs we can use to ascertain the credibility of a call-out. If a call-out doesn’t appear credible, down-vote it and explain why you don’t find it credible. If an agent is making a habit out of calling out people, down-vote him/her and perhaps express your displeasure. If calling out becomes undesirably common, start discouraging the behavior in general, without regard to the credibility of the call-out.
All right. Thanks for clarifying your position.
Has anyone tried making a script for this? Something that would compute some kind of “synthetic karma” so that I can easily see which of my comments were “genuinely” downvoted, which were caught in the crossfire of a mass-downvote, and which set someone off on a mass-downvote?