Once upon a time, there was an LW user called Eugine_Nier. (Not, I believe, the person’s actual name, but a pun on “engineer”.) Eugine was on the whole a valued LW contributor. There was at least one respect in which his positions tended to be some way from those of the typical LW user; he was considerably to the “right” on various sociopolitical issues, and quite outspokenly so.
Eugine got into arguments about race, gender, feminism and the like from time to time. After a while, some people noticed that after getting into such arguments they were mysteriously getting an awful lot of downvotes: it seemed that someone was going through their old comments and voting them down regardless of content. It didn’t take long to figure out that it was almost certainly Eugine doing it. The people this happened to were mostly ones who had had arguments with Eugine, but in some cases the trigger seemed to be merely expressing views markedly different from his. (Anything smacking of feminism or “social justice” was liable to attract the Wrath of Eugine.)
After a while, Eugine got banned from LW; I think it was for a combination of this mass-downvoting behaviour (which is generally considered improper; votes are “meant” to be expressions of opinion about particular comments rather than particular users; but note that this opinion is not universally agreed with on LW). Soon after, another account popped up whose behaviour was notably similar to Eugine’s, and the mass-downvoting was observed not to have stopped.
Eugine’s new account was banned. Another one appeared. That was banned. Another appeared. After a while, new Eugine accounts were appearing faster than the old ones were closed down.
While this was going on, Eugine’s behaviour changed a bit too. More and more of his comments were on those sociopolitical issues, they were more and more consistently hostile in tone, and he had less and less to say about anything else. And his mass-downvoting became (at least for some of his targets) more aggressive, with sockpuppet accounts used to downvote people multiple times.
Immediately before downvoting was disabled altogether a little while ago, a few LWers (I was one; I think a couple of the mods were, too) were being mass-downvoted by Eugine’s sockpuppets according to the following principle: Make sure that anything these people post has a negative net score. If you look at my user page and go back a few months, you will probably see that almost everything is at −1; if you hover your mouse over the scores and do the necessary calculations, you will see that many of them are at +6-7 or +7-8 or something of the sort. (Not, I think, because these were really excellent comments that would have been at +6 or +7 without Eugine; but because they were perfectly decent comments that would have been at 0 or +1 or thereabouts, and that got upvoted by others when Eugine’s sockpuppets voted them down.)
I think Eugine’s goals were (1) drive away people with the “wrong” sociopolitical views by making posting to LW an unpleasant activity for them, (2) make people with the “wrong” sociopolitical views look worse (it’s hard to ignore those karma scores completely when looking at a comment), and later on perhaps just (3) burn the whole thing down because it’s a nest of those awful feminists and social justice types.
There are various fairly obvious technical measures that could be taken against this sort of behaviour. Unfortunately, digging in the LW database and modifying the LW code are both very awkward, because the people who actually run it and have control over the data and the code are not LW participants and have more urgent calls on their time, and also because the code (basically an old version of Reddit) is a bit strange (the way the database is organized is not very convenient for manual investigation). So the moderators’ actions have mostly been limited to playing whack-a-mole with Eugine’s accounts.
I’ve been a little vague about Eugine’s actual opinions above, partly because describing the opinions of someone with whom you strongly disagree is perilous and partly because the conflict between Eugine and most of the rest of LW is as much about values and attitudes as about factual opinions, but here’s a rough sketch of how I think he sees the world. The racial prejudices commonly found in e.g. the US are based on fact; black people are systematically stupider and worse behaved than white people, and to a good approximation no black person has ever done anything truly impressive and admirable. Concern about police mistreatment of black people is nonsense; the police are just reacting appropriately to black criminality. Women are less intelligent than men, and if they are less likely to get hired by academic departments or promoted to executive positions or whatever then that, again, is simply a rational response to their inferiority. Talk of black, or gay, or transgender, “pride” is stupid: the perverts and trannies have nothing to be proud of. “Social justice” is basically a power-grab by groups without the ability to get power and respect by actually earning them. The best social structures are ones that put those people in their place and favour the genuinely superior. In case anyone’s been skim-reading, I will reiterate that that’s my attempt to sketch Eugine’s position; my own is quite different.
Thanks gjm! Once again you have used your presumably-valuable time to give me a really thorough explanation. Jeez, what a story.
Eugine’s new account was banned. Another one appeared. That was banned. Another appeared. After a while, new Eugine accounts were appearing faster than the old ones were closed down.
There’s movie material here. A dark psychological indie-thing about obsession and rage. “Troll”, starring… Steve Carrell? He was dead creepy in Foxcatcher.
I mean, to mess with a community once or twice is one thing. To keep coming back and back, unable to let it go or move on, is the stuff of tragedy.
Here’s a rough sketch of how I think he sees the world...
Good thing I joined after downvotes were disabled. I do not think we would be pals.
...that’s a very plain-vanilla story with little drama—compared to the baseline of ’net forums and online communities in general.
Well yeah, I suppose that’s true. But the screenwriter can zhuzh it up a bit, throw in a murder somewhere.
It would be… regrettable if LW turned into an ideologically homogeneous place where everyone sees the world in a basically similar way.
Absolutely. I didn’t come here for everyone to agree with me. But disagreement, even passionate ideological disagreement, isn’t the same as obsessively following people around to downvote everything they say. That’s just plain old batshittery. I’ll probably disagree with you at some point but I’m not going to put your name down on my List of Enemies Who Must Be Destroyed. It’s getting cluttered anyway.
I’m dying to know, who the heck is this Eugine character? I keep seeing the name but I don’t know the backstory.
OK, here’s the back story.
Once upon a time, there was an LW user called Eugine_Nier. (Not, I believe, the person’s actual name, but a pun on “engineer”.) Eugine was on the whole a valued LW contributor. There was at least one respect in which his positions tended to be some way from those of the typical LW user; he was considerably to the “right” on various sociopolitical issues, and quite outspokenly so.
Eugine got into arguments about race, gender, feminism and the like from time to time. After a while, some people noticed that after getting into such arguments they were mysteriously getting an awful lot of downvotes: it seemed that someone was going through their old comments and voting them down regardless of content. It didn’t take long to figure out that it was almost certainly Eugine doing it. The people this happened to were mostly ones who had had arguments with Eugine, but in some cases the trigger seemed to be merely expressing views markedly different from his. (Anything smacking of feminism or “social justice” was liable to attract the Wrath of Eugine.)
After a while, Eugine got banned from LW; I think it was for a combination of this mass-downvoting behaviour (which is generally considered improper; votes are “meant” to be expressions of opinion about particular comments rather than particular users; but note that this opinion is not universally agreed with on LW). Soon after, another account popped up whose behaviour was notably similar to Eugine’s, and the mass-downvoting was observed not to have stopped.
Eugine’s new account was banned. Another one appeared. That was banned. Another appeared. After a while, new Eugine accounts were appearing faster than the old ones were closed down.
While this was going on, Eugine’s behaviour changed a bit too. More and more of his comments were on those sociopolitical issues, they were more and more consistently hostile in tone, and he had less and less to say about anything else. And his mass-downvoting became (at least for some of his targets) more aggressive, with sockpuppet accounts used to downvote people multiple times.
Immediately before downvoting was disabled altogether a little while ago, a few LWers (I was one; I think a couple of the mods were, too) were being mass-downvoted by Eugine’s sockpuppets according to the following principle: Make sure that anything these people post has a negative net score. If you look at my user page and go back a few months, you will probably see that almost everything is at −1; if you hover your mouse over the scores and do the necessary calculations, you will see that many of them are at +6-7 or +7-8 or something of the sort. (Not, I think, because these were really excellent comments that would have been at +6 or +7 without Eugine; but because they were perfectly decent comments that would have been at 0 or +1 or thereabouts, and that got upvoted by others when Eugine’s sockpuppets voted them down.)
I think Eugine’s goals were (1) drive away people with the “wrong” sociopolitical views by making posting to LW an unpleasant activity for them, (2) make people with the “wrong” sociopolitical views look worse (it’s hard to ignore those karma scores completely when looking at a comment), and later on perhaps just (3) burn the whole thing down because it’s a nest of those awful feminists and social justice types.
There are various fairly obvious technical measures that could be taken against this sort of behaviour. Unfortunately, digging in the LW database and modifying the LW code are both very awkward, because the people who actually run it and have control over the data and the code are not LW participants and have more urgent calls on their time, and also because the code (basically an old version of Reddit) is a bit strange (the way the database is organized is not very convenient for manual investigation). So the moderators’ actions have mostly been limited to playing whack-a-mole with Eugine’s accounts.
I’ve been a little vague about Eugine’s actual opinions above, partly because describing the opinions of someone with whom you strongly disagree is perilous and partly because the conflict between Eugine and most of the rest of LW is as much about values and attitudes as about factual opinions, but here’s a rough sketch of how I think he sees the world. The racial prejudices commonly found in e.g. the US are based on fact; black people are systematically stupider and worse behaved than white people, and to a good approximation no black person has ever done anything truly impressive and admirable. Concern about police mistreatment of black people is nonsense; the police are just reacting appropriately to black criminality. Women are less intelligent than men, and if they are less likely to get hired by academic departments or promoted to executive positions or whatever then that, again, is simply a rational response to their inferiority. Talk of black, or gay, or transgender, “pride” is stupid: the perverts and trannies have nothing to be proud of. “Social justice” is basically a power-grab by groups without the ability to get power and respect by actually earning them. The best social structures are ones that put those people in their place and favour the genuinely superior. In case anyone’s been skim-reading, I will reiterate that that’s my attempt to sketch Eugine’s position; my own is quite different.
Thanks gjm! Once again you have used your presumably-valuable time to give me a really thorough explanation. Jeez, what a story.
There’s movie material here. A dark psychological indie-thing about obsession and rage. “Troll”, starring… Steve Carrell? He was dead creepy in Foxcatcher.
I mean, to mess with a community once or twice is one thing. To keep coming back and back, unable to let it go or move on, is the stuff of tragedy.
Good thing I joined after downvotes were disabled. I do not think we would be pals.
...that’s a very plain-vanilla story with little drama—compared to the baseline of ’net forums and online communities in general.
It would be… regrettable if LW turned into an ideologically homogeneous place where everyone sees the world in a basically similar way.
Well yeah, I suppose that’s true. But the screenwriter can zhuzh it up a bit, throw in a murder somewhere.
Absolutely. I didn’t come here for everyone to agree with me. But disagreement, even passionate ideological disagreement, isn’t the same as obsessively following people around to downvote everything they say. That’s just plain old batshittery. I’ll probably disagree with you at some point but I’m not going to put your name down on my List of Enemies Who Must Be Destroyed. It’s getting cluttered anyway.