While I take your point, it seems unlikely that that’s what’s motivating the response here. eli_sennesh and Eugine_Nier are about as far apart from each other politically as you can get without going into seriously fringe positions, with ialdabaoth in the middle, but there’s evidence of block downvoting for all of them. You’d need a pretty dastardly enemy to explain all of that.
(I don’t think block downvoting’s responsible for most of eli’s recent karma loss, though.)
(I don’t think block downvoting’s responsible for most of eli’s recent karma loss, though.)
Block, meaning organized effort? Definitely not. But I definitely find a −100 karma hit surprising, considering that even very hiveminded places like Reddit are very slow to accumulate comment votes in one direction or the other.
EDIT: And now I’m at +13 karma, which from −48 is simply absurd again. Is the system intended to produce dramatic swings like that? Have I invoked the “complain about downvoting, get upvoted like mad” effect seen normally on Reddit?
There’s a fairly common pattern where someone says something that a small handful of folks downvote, then other folks come along and upvote the comment back to zero because they don’t feel it deserves to be negative, even though they would not have upvoted it otherwise. You’ve been posting a lot lately, so getting shifts of several dozen karma back and forth due to this kind of dynamic is not unheard of, though it’s certainly extreme.
Concerted, not necessarily organized. It’s possible for one person to put a pretty big dent in someone else’s karma if they’re tolerant of boredom and have a reasonable amount of karma of their own; you get four possible downvotes to each upvote of your own (upvotes aren’t capped), which is only rate-limiting if you’re new, downvoting everything you see, or heavily downvoted yourself.
This just happens to have been a sensitive issue recently, as the links in JoshuaZ’s ancestor comment might imply.
I understand block downvoting as a user (one, but possibly more) just going through each and every post by a certain poster and downvoting each one without caring about what it says.
It is not an “organized effort” in the sense of a conspiracy.
Blockvoting may or may not be going on in this case, but at this point, I also assign a high probability that there are people who here downvote essentially all posts that potentially seem to be arguing for positions that are generally seen as to be on the left-end of the political spectrum. That seems include posts which are purely giving data and statistics.
As I mentioned, I accept the block downvoting exists, it’s pretty obvious. However the question is what remains after you filter it out. And as you yourself point out, in this case the remainder is still negative.
While I take your point, it seems unlikely that that’s what’s motivating the response here. eli_sennesh and Eugine_Nier are about as far apart from each other politically as you can get without going into seriously fringe positions, with ialdabaoth in the middle, but there’s evidence of block downvoting for all of them. You’d need a pretty dastardly enemy to explain all of that.
(I don’t think block downvoting’s responsible for most of eli’s recent karma loss, though.)
Block, meaning organized effort? Definitely not. But I definitely find a −100 karma hit surprising, considering that even very hiveminded places like Reddit are very slow to accumulate comment votes in one direction or the other.
EDIT: And now I’m at +13 karma, which from −48 is simply absurd again. Is the system intended to produce dramatic swings like that? Have I invoked the “complain about downvoting, get upvoted like mad” effect seen normally on Reddit?
There’s a fairly common pattern where someone says something that a small handful of folks downvote, then other folks come along and upvote the comment back to zero because they don’t feel it deserves to be negative, even though they would not have upvoted it otherwise. You’ve been posting a lot lately, so getting shifts of several dozen karma back and forth due to this kind of dynamic is not unheard of, though it’s certainly extreme.
Concerted, not necessarily organized. It’s possible for one person to put a pretty big dent in someone else’s karma if they’re tolerant of boredom and have a reasonable amount of karma of their own; you get four possible downvotes to each upvote of your own (upvotes aren’t capped), which is only rate-limiting if you’re new, downvoting everything you see, or heavily downvoted yourself.
This just happens to have been a sensitive issue recently, as the links in JoshuaZ’s ancestor comment might imply.
Well, I’m sorry for kvetching, then.
I understand block downvoting as a user (one, but possibly more) just going through each and every post by a certain poster and downvoting each one without caring about what it says.
It is not an “organized effort” in the sense of a conspiracy.
Blockvoting may or may not be going on in this case, but at this point, I also assign a high probability that there are people who here downvote essentially all posts that potentially seem to be arguing for positions that are generally seen as to be on the left-end of the political spectrum. That seems include posts which are purely giving data and statistics.
Ah, well. I blame Clippy, then.
As I mentioned, I accept the block downvoting exists, it’s pretty obvious. However the question is what remains after you filter it out. And as you yourself point out, in this case the remainder is still negative.