But how does one decide whether someone believes something about the comment, or is just punishing generally?
Because one notices that one’s karma went down by like 40 points in the matter of minutes and posts from long ago suddenly acquired −1s.
There already was some discussion/drama about that a year ago or so which ended up with the account of Eugene_Nier being banned for that practice. It involved mods looking up actual patterns of voting.
To give you a bit of context, there is belief that the same person is behind the accounts of Eugene_Nier (banned), Azathoth (banned), and now VoiceOfRa. There is also some political overlay because VoiceOfRa (and previous accounts) is a neoreactionary and an unapologetic conservative which is very visible in his posts. Most of the complaints about VoiceOfRa come from people who think he downvoted them (as the last mod look at the voting patterns showed, some of them are right and some of them are wrong about that) and these people are mostly left-wing.
Normally this calls for a straightforward technical solution along the lines of “if you start downvoting many comments, the system will impose growing time limits on when you can downvote another comment”—very similar to how many computer systems deal with bad logins. However LW has no one who has both time and authority to work on its code base and thus we’re stuck debating stupid political solutions to a technical problem.
I don’t think you’ve characterized it quite right. It’s not just that (1) Eugine/Azathoth/VoR is conservative and (2) most people who think he’s mass-downvoted them are liberal. It’s also that (3) the mass-downvoting appears to be targeted at people for being liberal: the surest way to get a batch of bonus downvotes from E/A/V is to go into a thread where gender and race and politics are being discussed and say something conspicuously non-neoreactionary.
Your comment (deliberately?) gives the impression that the whole business has been politicized by E/A/V’s opponents, but it seems very clear to me that his mass-downvoting was political from the outset.
I did not mean to imply any direction of causality. I think a better statement would be to say that VoiceOfRa downvotes people whose views he dislikes—and given his own political views, those people are mostly left-wing.
But yes, you are correct in that the politics do not originate from VoiceOfRa’s opponents.
Because one notices that one’s karma went down by like 40 points in the matter of minutes and posts from long ago suddenly acquired −1s.
There already was some discussion/drama about that a year ago or so which ended up with the account of Eugene_Nier being banned for that practice. It involved mods looking up actual patterns of voting.
To give you a bit of context, there is belief that the same person is behind the accounts of Eugene_Nier (banned), Azathoth (banned), and now VoiceOfRa. There is also some political overlay because VoiceOfRa (and previous accounts) is a neoreactionary and an unapologetic conservative which is very visible in his posts. Most of the complaints about VoiceOfRa come from people who think he downvoted them (as the last mod look at the voting patterns showed, some of them are right and some of them are wrong about that) and these people are mostly left-wing.
Normally this calls for a straightforward technical solution along the lines of “if you start downvoting many comments, the system will impose growing time limits on when you can downvote another comment”—very similar to how many computer systems deal with bad logins. However LW has no one who has both time and authority to work on its code base and thus we’re stuck debating stupid political solutions to a technical problem.
I don’t think you’ve characterized it quite right. It’s not just that (1) Eugine/Azathoth/VoR is conservative and (2) most people who think he’s mass-downvoted them are liberal. It’s also that (3) the mass-downvoting appears to be targeted at people for being liberal: the surest way to get a batch of bonus downvotes from E/A/V is to go into a thread where gender and race and politics are being discussed and say something conspicuously non-neoreactionary.
Your comment (deliberately?) gives the impression that the whole business has been politicized by E/A/V’s opponents, but it seems very clear to me that his mass-downvoting was political from the outset.
I did not mean to imply any direction of causality. I think a better statement would be to say that VoiceOfRa downvotes people whose views he dislikes—and given his own political views, those people are mostly left-wing.
But yes, you are correct in that the politics do not originate from VoiceOfRa’s opponents.