It’s probably worth talking to these people and seeing if the timing works out the same, but it does seem likely that the downvoting is all caused by the same person, and thus would have similar motives and MO with the downvoting.
Personally, I am pretty certain that is gender issues that cause my karma stalking. It’s the only topic I write on that gets any significant number of downvotes. Also, due to timing, my best guess (though I’m not highly confident) is that the triggering event was my post in the mistakes thread admitting to staying married longer than I should have due to not being confident in my independence. I knew when writing it that some of the MRA assholes on here would take offense at it.
Also, whoever is doing it has pretty effectively made me unlikely to post a lot on here. (I still occassionally browse, and obviously I’m writing this, so it’s not like I’ve completely quit or anything.) It’s annoying to deal with (and saying “you should just stop caring” is about as effective of advice as telling people to “be more confident”). Considering that half my facebook feed is rationalist/LWers anyways, it’s higher reward to just post my thoughts there and not have to deal with the LW baggage, but still get the interesting conversation with the people I want to talk with anyways.
Just figured I should say something because if evaporative cooling is happening in general (and it isn’t just me), it could be hidden because the people who leave aren’t saying anything.
(ETA: I actually have not lost a LOT of karma from this, so it’s not the amount/number. It’s just the fact that it’s consistent, and it’s everything I post)
That’s actually pretty frightening, since that indicates that this sort of thing has a real impact on the tenor and participation in the community. This strongly makes me update to thinking that we should have admins actually look at logs for this sort of thing.
I post here must less often that I used to. Reasons: 1) Not good use of my time 2) This site reinforces modes of thought that are not useful for me—I love philosophy, especially moral philosophy, but that’s not what I do for a living and I shouldn’t allow my mental attention to be diverted. 3) Highly predictable downvotes on the topics I want to discuss—with a perception that one side gets more downvotes than the other for the purpose of evaporative cooling away of the one side. Of course, I think my side gets the short end of that stick (and I would, because politics and personal identity are the mind-killer).
Objectively, 1 & 2 are more important reasons, but subjectively, 3 feels more causally relevant to my withdrawal.
Huh. This just convinced me that I should be quick to upvote things if they were even a little helpful, so that no one who isn’t posting really counterproductive stuff gets that negative hit. Because you’re probably not on my facebook feed, and I probably don’t already agree with all the things you’re going to say, so I want you and people like you to keep posting on lesswrong.
I have what seems to me like quite good evidence that there is at least one LW user who engages in what one might call intimidatory downvoting of users who express “progressive” views on gender.
I consider this a very, very bad thing for LW.
I am not aware of any reason to think that there is intimidatory downvoting based on any other issue. (Of course there might be some that I haven’t noticed.)
Do you mean by “intimidatory downvoting” something substantively different from the thing (or things) others have referred to as “retributative downvoting”, “block-downvoting”, “karmassassination”, etc., in this and related threads? If so, can you clarify what you mean?
Intimidatory downvoting: Downvoting whose purpose is to discourage people from expressing certain kinds of views on LW by the threat of massive karma loss. (In particular, the threat of much more than they would lose just from having their comments expressing those views downvoted.)
Retributive downvoting: Downvoting whose purpose is to get back at someone who has annoyed or upset you, or whom you don’t like for some other reason.
Block-downvoting: Largely-indiscriminative downvoting of a user’s comments, whatever the reason. (I might also use the term to describe downvoting everything in some conversation, though I might not because it isn’t standard terminology.)
Karmassassination: Large-scale downvoting whose aim is to reduce a particular user’s karma score, for whatever reason (could be retributive, could be because you’ve nothing personal against them but think, after careful reflection, that it would be best for LW if they left, etc.).
I dislike intimidatory downvoting because (1) it’s unreasonably unpleasant for the victim, (2) it seems like an attempt to exercise more power over what views are expressed on LW than the karma system is really meant to enable, (3) it distorts the per-comment information karma scores are meant to provide (expressed not only in the scores themselves but in thread ordering), and (4) because most users will avoid it on account of #1 and #3, it gives extra influence to those who care less about the LW community as a whole and extra importance to opinions on topics that push those people’s buttons.
[EDITED to add: It occurs to me that it’s possible that when not explicitly prompted to distinguish carefully between these terms, I may actually use them less carefully. I don’t think so, though. I don’t think I’ve actually used, as opposed to quoting others’ use of, the term “karmassassination”, which I find ugly. Though I suppose maybe an ugly thing deserves an ugly word. I’ve also used the term “mass-downvoting”, meaning much the same as “block-downvoting”.]
Ideological difference is particularly pervasive in topics that are related to social sciences. I get the feeling from reading your post that you’re angry. Angry not about the downvoting but more about the ideological differences.
Personally, I am pretty certain that is gender issues that cause my karma stalking. It’s the only topic I write on that gets any significant number of downvotes. Also, due to timing, my best guess (though I’m not highly confident) is that the triggering event was my post in the mistakes thread admitting to staying married longer than I should have due to not being confident in my independence. I knew when writing it that some of the MRA assholes on here would take offense at it.
Also, whoever is doing it has pretty effectively made me unlikely to post a lot on here. (I still occassionally browse, and obviously I’m writing this, so it’s not like I’ve completely quit or anything.) It’s annoying to deal with (and saying “you should just stop caring” is about as effective of advice as telling people to “be more confident”). Considering that half my facebook feed is rationalist/LWers anyways, it’s higher reward to just post my thoughts there and not have to deal with the LW baggage, but still get the interesting conversation with the people I want to talk with anyways.
Just figured I should say something because if evaporative cooling is happening in general (and it isn’t just me), it could be hidden because the people who leave aren’t saying anything.
(ETA: I actually have not lost a LOT of karma from this, so it’s not the amount/number. It’s just the fact that it’s consistent, and it’s everything I post)
That’s actually pretty frightening, since that indicates that this sort of thing has a real impact on the tenor and participation in the community. This strongly makes me update to thinking that we should have admins actually look at logs for this sort of thing.
Data Point (of questionable value):
I post here must less often that I used to. Reasons:
1) Not good use of my time
2) This site reinforces modes of thought that are not useful for me—I love philosophy, especially moral philosophy, but that’s not what I do for a living and I shouldn’t allow my mental attention to be diverted.
3) Highly predictable downvotes on the topics I want to discuss—with a perception that one side gets more downvotes than the other for the purpose of evaporative cooling away of the one side. Of course, I think my side gets the short end of that stick (and I would, because politics and personal identity are the mind-killer).
Objectively, 1 & 2 are more important reasons, but subjectively, 3 feels more causally relevant to my withdrawal.
It seems conceptually easy to create a script to return sets of votes that satisfy the following conditions:
1) Occur fairly close together, time-wise 2) Are made by the same user 3) Are down-votes 4) Decrease the post’s score by ⇒ a fraction
This would likely make it easier for mods to review things like this. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time+skills to do this.
Huh. This just convinced me that I should be quick to upvote things if they were even a little helpful, so that no one who isn’t posting really counterproductive stuff gets that negative hit. Because you’re probably not on my facebook feed, and I probably don’t already agree with all the things you’re going to say, so I want you and people like you to keep posting on lesswrong.
I have what seems to me like quite good evidence that there is at least one LW user who engages in what one might call intimidatory downvoting of users who express “progressive” views on gender.
I consider this a very, very bad thing for LW.
I am not aware of any reason to think that there is intimidatory downvoting based on any other issue. (Of course there might be some that I haven’t noticed.)
Do you mean by “intimidatory downvoting” something substantively different from the thing (or things) others have referred to as “retributative downvoting”, “block-downvoting”, “karmassassination”, etc., in this and related threads? If so, can you clarify what you mean?
I’ll explain how I use all those terms.
Intimidatory downvoting: Downvoting whose purpose is to discourage people from expressing certain kinds of views on LW by the threat of massive karma loss. (In particular, the threat of much more than they would lose just from having their comments expressing those views downvoted.)
Retributive downvoting: Downvoting whose purpose is to get back at someone who has annoyed or upset you, or whom you don’t like for some other reason.
Block-downvoting: Largely-indiscriminative downvoting of a user’s comments, whatever the reason. (I might also use the term to describe downvoting everything in some conversation, though I might not because it isn’t standard terminology.)
Karmassassination: Large-scale downvoting whose aim is to reduce a particular user’s karma score, for whatever reason (could be retributive, could be because you’ve nothing personal against them but think, after careful reflection, that it would be best for LW if they left, etc.).
I dislike intimidatory downvoting because (1) it’s unreasonably unpleasant for the victim, (2) it seems like an attempt to exercise more power over what views are expressed on LW than the karma system is really meant to enable, (3) it distorts the per-comment information karma scores are meant to provide (expressed not only in the scores themselves but in thread ordering), and (4) because most users will avoid it on account of #1 and #3, it gives extra influence to those who care less about the LW community as a whole and extra importance to opinions on topics that push those people’s buttons.
[EDITED to add: It occurs to me that it’s possible that when not explicitly prompted to distinguish carefully between these terms, I may actually use them less carefully. I don’t think so, though. I don’t think I’ve actually used, as opposed to quoting others’ use of, the term “karmassassination”, which I find ugly. Though I suppose maybe an ugly thing deserves an ugly word. I’ve also used the term “mass-downvoting”, meaning much the same as “block-downvoting”.]
(nods) Makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.
Ideological difference is particularly pervasive in topics that are related to social sciences. I get the feeling from reading your post that you’re angry. Angry not about the downvoting but more about the ideological differences.