What are we calling retributive downvoting, incidentally?
What bad guys do.
There is an occasionally quoted heuristic: “Vote up what you’d like to see more of; vote down what you’d like to see less of”. When good guys do that it’s called karma system working as intended. When bad guys do that it’s called abuse of the karma system.
What gets called “retributive voting” is when you vote something down not because of its own (de)merits but because of its author. That’s bad for LW no matter who does it. Someone who does it much is (I suggest) ipso facto not a good guy any more.
I have never seen anyone defending such behaviour as “karma system working as intended”, so I’m not seeing the hypocrisy you complain of. Can you point to a couple of examples?
(It’s also an abuse of the karma system if you systematically vote someone’s comments up because you approve of that person. I’ve no idea whether that’s a thing that happens—aside from the case where the voter and the beneficiary are really the same person, which is an abuse of the system for other reasons—because it’s harder to notice: most people’s karma, most of the time, goes up rather than down, and the main way retributive downvoting gets spotted is when someone notices that they’ve suddenly lost a lot of karma.)
Actually, let’s take this in another direction: Suppose the moderator(s) (Is Nancy the only one left) are out on vacation, and Eugine shows up again, and has already farmed enough karma to begin downvoting.
Would it be a Good Guy act, or a Bad Guy act, to downvote all of his karma-farming comments?
I’m not keen on this sort of binary classification. But: I don’t think I would do it in most versions of this scenario, though I dare say some other reasonable people would.
What’s interesting to me about your choice of scenario is that it’s one in which an “identity-based” sanction has already been applied: Eugine, specifically, is not supposed to be active here any more. It would not be so very surprising if that provided an exception to the general principle that voting should be content-based rather than identity-based.
What gets called “retributive voting” is when you vote something down not because of its own (de)merits but because of its author. That’s bad for LW no matter who does it. Someone who does it much is (I suggest) ipso facto not a good guy any more.
That’s the modern Less Wrongian perspective. Prior to Eugine’s ban, there was, in fact, some general support for the idea of getting rid of persistently bad users via user-based downvotes via the karma system. The Overton Window was shifted by Eugine’s ban (and his subsequent and repeated reappearances, complete with the same behaviors).
I have never seen anyone defending such behaviour as “karma system working as intended”
You’re either newer than I thought, or didn’t pay attention. There was a -lot- of defense of this during Eugine’s ban by people worried that Less Wrong would be destroyed by bad users. (They by and large supported Eugine’s ban, as they objected to the automation of it, and also I think didn’t want to die on the hill of defending an extremely unpopular figure.)
My memory is very far from perfect, but I don’t remember there ever being much support for downvoting “bad” users into oblivion. Do you have a couple of links, perhaps? In any case, what Lumifer wrote was “When good guys do that it’s called karma system working as intended” and not “A few years ago, some people on LW were in favour of good guys doing that”, which seems to me a very different proposition indeed.
There was a -lot- of defense of this during Eugine’s ban
I’m just looking through the comments to the announcement of Eugine’s ban. There are a lot of comments. So far, the only instance I can find of someone defending mass-downvoting in some cases is … Lumifer.
… OK, there are a couple more: wedrifid suggesting it might be an appropriate treatment for trollish sockpuppets and MugaSofer not actually defending mass-downvoting but saying that some (unspecified) people think it is sometimes justified.
… And, having now finished (though I confess I skimmed some subthreads that didn’t seem likely to contain opinions on this point), that’s all I found. So we have Lumifer defending his right (in principle) to mass-downvote someone he thinks is a hopeless case; wedrifid suggesting that mass-downvoting might be an appropriate sanction for trollish sockpuppets and the like; and MugaSofer saying that some people think mass-downvoting is sometimes OK; and that’s it. That’s in a thread of hundreds of comments, a large fraction of which either explicitly say what an ugly thing mass-downvoting is or implicitly agree with the general sentiment.
That doesn’t look to me like “a -lot- of defense”. Maybe I looked in the wrong place. Again, do you have a link or two?
I cannot provide links, unfortunately, no, because most of it happened in background threads, although MugaSofer’s comment can be taken as confirmation that this was, in fact, being talked about. This was a… semi-popular topic on how Less Wrong could be improved around that time, when I happened to be unusually active, although I left in disgust right before Eugine’s ban, IIRC, over the fact that my most upvoted comments were what I considered basic-level social sanity, and the stuff I wrote that I expected to be taken seriously tended to get downvoted (later I realized that Less Wrong is just incredibly socially inept, but relatively skilled in the areas I expected to be taken seriously, so comparative advantage went overwhelmingly in favor of my social skills, which happened to be considerably better than I had thought at the time). Eugine didn’t invent the idea of mass-downvoting, he merely implemented what was being discussed.
It seems that all we have here is your recollection of how much support the idea had (“semi-popular” or “a -lot-”; I’m not sure what the intersection of those two is) versus mine (scarcely any). I’m not sure we can make much further progress on that basis, but it really doesn’t matter because the actual question at issue was about opinions now; do you think there is currently any support to speak of on LW for constructive mass-downvoting?
What bad guys do.
There is an occasionally quoted heuristic: “Vote up what you’d like to see more of; vote down what you’d like to see less of”. When good guys do that it’s called karma system working as intended. When bad guys do that it’s called abuse of the karma system.
This is simply untrue.
What gets called “retributive voting” is when you vote something down not because of its own (de)merits but because of its author. That’s bad for LW no matter who does it. Someone who does it much is (I suggest) ipso facto not a good guy any more.
I have never seen anyone defending such behaviour as “karma system working as intended”, so I’m not seeing the hypocrisy you complain of. Can you point to a couple of examples?
(It’s also an abuse of the karma system if you systematically vote someone’s comments up because you approve of that person. I’ve no idea whether that’s a thing that happens—aside from the case where the voter and the beneficiary are really the same person, which is an abuse of the system for other reasons—because it’s harder to notice: most people’s karma, most of the time, goes up rather than down, and the main way retributive downvoting gets spotted is when someone notices that they’ve suddenly lost a lot of karma.)
Actually, let’s take this in another direction: Suppose the moderator(s) (Is Nancy the only one left) are out on vacation, and Eugine shows up again, and has already farmed enough karma to begin downvoting.
Would it be a Good Guy act, or a Bad Guy act, to downvote all of his karma-farming comments?
I’m not keen on this sort of binary classification. But: I don’t think I would do it in most versions of this scenario, though I dare say some other reasonable people would.
What’s interesting to me about your choice of scenario is that it’s one in which an “identity-based” sanction has already been applied: Eugine, specifically, is not supposed to be active here any more. It would not be so very surprising if that provided an exception to the general principle that voting should be content-based rather than identity-based.
That’s the modern Less Wrongian perspective. Prior to Eugine’s ban, there was, in fact, some general support for the idea of getting rid of persistently bad users via user-based downvotes via the karma system. The Overton Window was shifted by Eugine’s ban (and his subsequent and repeated reappearances, complete with the same behaviors).
You’re either newer than I thought, or didn’t pay attention. There was a -lot- of defense of this during Eugine’s ban by people worried that Less Wrong would be destroyed by bad users. (They by and large supported Eugine’s ban, as they objected to the automation of it, and also I think didn’t want to die on the hill of defending an extremely unpopular figure.)
My memory is very far from perfect, but I don’t remember there ever being much support for downvoting “bad” users into oblivion. Do you have a couple of links, perhaps? In any case, what Lumifer wrote was “When good guys do that it’s called karma system working as intended” and not “A few years ago, some people on LW were in favour of good guys doing that”, which seems to me a very different proposition indeed.
I’m just looking through the comments to the announcement of Eugine’s ban. There are a lot of comments. So far, the only instance I can find of someone defending mass-downvoting in some cases is … Lumifer.
… OK, there are a couple more: wedrifid suggesting it might be an appropriate treatment for trollish sockpuppets and MugaSofer not actually defending mass-downvoting but saying that some (unspecified) people think it is sometimes justified.
… And, having now finished (though I confess I skimmed some subthreads that didn’t seem likely to contain opinions on this point), that’s all I found. So we have Lumifer defending his right (in principle) to mass-downvote someone he thinks is a hopeless case; wedrifid suggesting that mass-downvoting might be an appropriate sanction for trollish sockpuppets and the like; and MugaSofer saying that some people think mass-downvoting is sometimes OK; and that’s it. That’s in a thread of hundreds of comments, a large fraction of which either explicitly say what an ugly thing mass-downvoting is or implicitly agree with the general sentiment.
That doesn’t look to me like “a -lot- of defense”. Maybe I looked in the wrong place. Again, do you have a link or two?
I cannot provide links, unfortunately, no, because most of it happened in background threads, although MugaSofer’s comment can be taken as confirmation that this was, in fact, being talked about. This was a… semi-popular topic on how Less Wrong could be improved around that time, when I happened to be unusually active, although I left in disgust right before Eugine’s ban, IIRC, over the fact that my most upvoted comments were what I considered basic-level social sanity, and the stuff I wrote that I expected to be taken seriously tended to get downvoted (later I realized that Less Wrong is just incredibly socially inept, but relatively skilled in the areas I expected to be taken seriously, so comparative advantage went overwhelmingly in favor of my social skills, which happened to be considerably better than I had thought at the time). Eugine didn’t invent the idea of mass-downvoting, he merely implemented what was being discussed.
It seems that all we have here is your recollection of how much support the idea had (“semi-popular” or “a -lot-”; I’m not sure what the intersection of those two is) versus mine (scarcely any). I’m not sure we can make much further progress on that basis, but it really doesn’t matter because the actual question at issue was about opinions now; do you think there is currently any support to speak of on LW for constructive mass-downvoting?
Yeah, that’s what I’m afraid of.