Good thing LessWrong cares only about the past and nobody is interested in anything that might happen in the future :p
And anyway this is not the only reason, you can easily argue (I am doing it right now) that it is better for a site to have less fake accounts. It might be just slightly better but it is not very hard to implement a fix anyway so we might as well implement it and make this place slightly better.
A word from a cranky tech professional: unless you are personally capable of making a change to a system, make no assumptions as to how easy or hard it is to implement.
It’s reasonable to conclude “if this is a potential problem, and it’s easy to solve, we should implement that solution assuming the solution does not cause other problems.” But negative karma was deliberately implemented to keep disruptive individuals from continually posting after being heavily downvoted. To my knowledge, while there are people who’ve created sockpuppet accounts, the issue of someone creating a sockpuppet to get around negative karma has not yet come up (and if it has, the people doing it managed to create a sufficiently clean break from their earlier records that their taking up new handles was probably for the best.) On the other hand, people who’ve been regularly disruptive and had their posting throttled by negative karma is an issue that has come up before.
Good thing LessWrong cares only about the past and nobody is interested in anything that might happen in the future :p
And anyway this is not the only reason, you can easily argue (I am doing it right now) that it is better for a site to have less fake accounts. It might be just slightly better but it is not very hard to implement a fix anyway so we might as well implement it and make this place slightly better.
A word from a cranky tech professional: unless you are personally capable of making a change to a system, make no assumptions as to how easy or hard it is to implement.
Wise words. I should’ve said ‘..if it is not very hard to implement a fix we might as well...’
It’s reasonable to conclude “if this is a potential problem, and it’s easy to solve, we should implement that solution assuming the solution does not cause other problems.” But negative karma was deliberately implemented to keep disruptive individuals from continually posting after being heavily downvoted. To my knowledge, while there are people who’ve created sockpuppet accounts, the issue of someone creating a sockpuppet to get around negative karma has not yet come up (and if it has, the people doing it managed to create a sufficiently clean break from their earlier records that their taking up new handles was probably for the best.) On the other hand, people who’ve been regularly disruptive and had their posting throttled by negative karma is an issue that has come up before.