I am going to publicly call for banning user VoiceOfRa for the following reasons:
(1) VoiceOfRa is almost certainly the same person as Eugene_Nier and Azathoth123. This is well known in rationality circles; many of us have been willing to give him a second chance under a new username because he usually makes valuable contributions.
(2) VoiceOfRa almost certainly downvote bombed the user who made the grandparent comment, including downvoting some very uncontroversial and reasonable comments.
(3) As I have said before in this context, downvote abuse is very clear evidence of being mindkilled. It is also a surefire way to ensure you never change your mind, because you discourage people who disagree with you from taking part in the discussion and therefore prohibit yourself from updating on their information. I do not understand how someone who genuinely believes in epistemic rationality could think this is a good strategy.
I will also note that I was the first person to publicly call out Eugine_Nier under his previous username, Azathoth123, at http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0g/link_quotasmicroaggressionandmeritocracy/bd4o . Like I said in that comment, I continue to believe he is a valuable contributor to the community. Like many other people, I have been willing to give him a second chance under his new username. However, this was conditional on completely ceasing and desisting with the downvote abuse. And yes, any downvoting of old comments made in a different context is a clear example of abuse.
The following links provide background material for readers who are unfamiliar with Eugine_Nier and the context in which I am requesting a ban:
Edited to add: If I see clear evidence that VoiceOfRa is not Eugine_Nier, or that he was not behind the most recent downvote abuse, I will retract this message and publicly apologize
It is clearly the same person. And yes, he’s actively trying to drive away people for disagreeing with his politics (and/or correctly predicting the presence of neo-reactionaries in a conversation, based on past experience). He also seems to use multiple sockpuppets for upvotes, although I suppose lots of people could just be functionally illiterate.
Giving him a “second” chance seems like a clear failure at reflective decision theory. The punishment should discourage the crime, not just stop the crime. So far it’s done neither.
No doubt Nier believes the whole “Cathedral” has defected against him—but unless you think he started out responding to some credible abuse on LW, I really don’t care. His beliefs are not Bayesian evidence.
If argument screens of authority (http://lesswrong.com/lw/lx/argument_screens_off_authority/), then argument clearly also screens off lack of authority. Moreover, when someone has a repeated history of making arguments that stand on their own, it would be foolish to make the claim that that person’s opinions carry a likelihood ratio of 1. Repeated history of sound arguments is pretty much the definition of authority.
I am the one who called for banning VoiceOfRa, and I stand by that judgement. It is more important to me that we don’t give veto power over who joins this community to a lone neoreactionary. However, it would be disingenious to claim that it wouldn’t be a difficult trade-off. The community would clearly lose something valuable.
I meant the implied beliefs about persecution. Though I could quibble about the rest. Again, you could think the evidence linked in the grandparent shows that LW is too rewarding of contrarianism and/or conservatism, without checking to see if a complaint is based on reality; you could also think instead that Nier is using sockpuppets to reward himself. But you can’t think everything is fine.
May I point out that the link above links to a post with negative karma
I decided to investigate the Voice of Ra issue after seeing an apparently baseless accusation elsewhere (not this thread) that he was downvoting retributively
The logic given in the above link for his allegedly multiple identities is extremely poor. I am entirely unconvinced and shame all those who have both accused him or naively accepted those accusations without good reason
I wouldn’t go as far as to counter claim that other rationalists are retributively accusing him, since I have no reason to privellage that hypothesis. It is interesting, however, that the claim is made that it is well known that he uses multiple identities for nefarious purposes. I dare say that if it was the case that he was so dodgy, I suspect Nancy or another moderator would take action, as has been done before and has recieved considerable karma in consequence.
I call for all the accused to substantiate their claims thoroughly, or apologise to both VoiceofRa and his alleged secondary accounts.
I call for any higher status users in our community to really critically consider such claims the same way you might critically look at other privellaged areas and not accept bullying and slander where it may exist. I hope some of the unofficial LW leadership take some initiative here.
he’s actively trying to drive away people for disagreeing with his politics
No, I don’t think so.
In the context of online debates, “actively trying to drive away” means things like threats, discussion of sexual inadequacies, and expressed desires for someone to die in a fire. That is not the case here.
And people who are that sensitive to their karma score are unlikely to be comfortable in LW anyway.
And people who are that sensitive to their karma score are unlikely to be comfortable in LW anyway.
There is a huge difference between mass downvoting happening to an experienced user or to a new user. The experienced user has a lot of karma to waste; and they also have a long history of feedback that their contributions are welcomed by the community. The new user will more likely evaluate the feedback incorrectly (as a dislike by community, as opposed to by a single user who happens to be not representative of the community), and in extreme cases can even lose the ability to post.
My main concern is the abuse of downvotes against new users, which happened in the past, and where in most cases we will never know it happened, because the new users will disappear without giving feedback to the community.
An inefficient way would do. But maybe “shockingly inefficient” is as good as it gets. The Reddit database architecture (which IIRC LW uses) is … unusual.
I am sure I’m not immune to the typical mind fallacy, but LW is known for not being particularly gentle with posts it disagrees with. It’s pretty far away from a circle jerk. People who are uncomfortable with disapproval are likely to find it unpleasant, regardless of whether it is expressed as a downvote or as a contrary comment.
Note that I’m not arguing that LW should deliberately drive away the thin-skinned, that’s certainly a bad idea. However I don’t think that someone who is upset by a downvote is going to react well to a comment (or two, or many) telling him he’s wrong.
And people who are that sensitive to their karma score are unlikely to be comfortable in LW anyway.
The thing is, a downvote campaign isn’t just a losing a point or two, it’s more like losing 30 points for no apparent reason in a day. Or, as happened to me for a while, having a downvote appear just about as soon as I posted much of anything. I like LW pretty much, but that really did take away some of the sparkle for me.
A downvote carries much less information than a comment. It’s possible to think about whether a comment is reasonable.
I suspect that you’re underestimating the psychology behind Karma. The first time Eugine_Neir did this was a natural experiment, and we saw several very valuable members leave from the mass downvoting.
“Actively trying to drive people away” means doing something with the intention of trying to drive someone away. That could mean screaming at them, overusing the word ‘moist’, or agreeing with them when they want an argument. It could also mean downvotes. It may be hard to judge if someone is trying to drive someone away, but defaulting to “they are not openly being abusive blowhards” is not really useful unless the only thing you care about is abusive blowhards.
However, I would argue that “actively trying to drive people away” is less important that “driving away productive contributors”.
I haven’t gone back and checked, but I seem to remember hearing that Eugene_Nier, when contacted by a moderator the first time, said he was trying to drive away people that he considered unproductive. So if it’s the same person it’s likely that he still tries to drive people away.
I arrive late but with a link to the Kaj_Sotala post you’re probably thinking of:
I sent two messages to Eugine, requesting an explanation. I received a response today. Eugine admitted his guilt, expressing the opinion that LW’s karma system was failing to carry out its purpose of keeping out weak material and that he was engaged in a “weeding” of users who he did not think displayed sufficient rationality.
getting into politically charged arguments with newbies and then down voting them
I don’t pay any particular attention to whom VoiceOfRa replies or does not, but it is not my impression that he specifically targets newbies. In the current case under discussion he seems to have been triggered by the phrase “misogynist asshole”.
The accusation is not of sockpuppetry, the accusation is that VoiceOfRa downvotes comments regardless of their content as a “punishment” for the poster. It’s still one vote, but some people feel it’s… misused.
Thanks, I see. But how does one decide whether someone believes something about the comment, or is just punishing generally? I guess we might require a comment if there is a down vote? Or the moderators could look at voting patterns overall, or in special cases where attention has been called. I am new to LW so I have little sense of context.
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.
I am going to publicly call for banning user VoiceOfRa [...] VoiceOfRa almost certainly downvote bombed the user who made the grandparent comment, including downvoting some very uncontroversial and reasonable comments.
Consequentially...why bother even if this is true?
Assuming you are correct, Eugene’s response to being banned (twice!) was to just make another account. It’s highly likely that if you ban this new account, he will make a fourth account. That account will quickly quickly gain karma because, as you note, Eugene’s comments are actually valuable. You are proposing that we do the same thing a third time and expect a different result.
Possible actual solutions that are way too much work:
move LW on to an Omnilibrium like system of voting where Eugene’s votes will put him strongly into the optimate cluster and won’t hurt as much.
My proposed solution would be something like this:
unban the Eugine_Nier account;
completely disable the Azathoth123 and VoiceOfRa account, e.g. replace their passwords with random junk and throw them away so nobody can log into them;
implement a feature whereby you cannot downvote more than X comments (or more than X’ comments by the same author) in a Y-hour period (or need to solve a captcha to do so).
Have an active moderator who will look at suspected cases of mass downvoting in a timely manner (and then punish the downvoter and mod up the victim again)
It is our inability to implement this solution which necessitates all the other ones.
We don’t want to remove the ability to do mass downvoting. If someone posts 100 random Wikipedia articles in the belief that this provides insight, they should be downvoted. What we want to do is remove the ability to do mass downvoting based on the downvoter’s motivation. No automated process can detect motivation, so we can’t do that without using a moderator.
I think you may be using different definitions of “mass downvoting”. I think Jiro means downvoting many of one user’s comments with just one account. I think several people have “mass-downvoted” Clarity this week, but nobody complained.
How about having a limit to what proportion of another user’s downvotes are allowed to come from one user? So if clarity gets downvoted by 20 people there are no limits to how many votes they can get from each of them, but if it is only Nier going on a spree against a new user he pretty soon runs into 5% or whatever the limit is, and then can’t downvote that user any more.
OTOH a formal definition of what qualifies as mass downvoting could prevent bickering about whether a particular instance does. Dunno if the benefits would outweigh the costs, though.
The captcha seems like a terrible solution when we have someone following Penn Jillette’s advice for stage magicians:
Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest.
You’re effectively suggesting we put up a fence (to use Moody’s example) in order to show him we disapprove of what he’s doing. He already knows that.
Well, at least a captcha would prevent people from using scripts to downvote each other’s comments, but I don’t think VoiceOfRa is doing that now (though he probably was when going by Eugene Nier). But yes, blocking people altogether from casting too many downvotes would probably make more sense.
I’m not sure about the mathematical details, but as described in their FAQ, they presume that it’s inevitable that people will form into local Blue and Green tribes, so they attempt to cluster the population into Blue and Green to not just be a better recommendation engine to both Blues and Greens, but also calculate a nonpartisan score of upvotes by the other side and downvotes by your side.
In general, I thought this was fascinating because it gets to the heart about what voting is for on social websites. If we’re trying to build a recommendation engine, having an extremely diverse set of viewpoints is probably something that we want in the input stream of links and discussion. However, we then don’t want to have everyone’s voting then represent a single score variable, because people are different and have different worldviews. Mixing everyone’s scores together will make a homogenized mess that doesn’t really speak to anyone.
The idea of tracking partisanship not just to Bayes voting to make better recommendations to users, but to get a sense of nonpartisan quality really impressed me as an idea that’s totally obvious...in retrospect. I do wonder how well it scales, as Omnilibrium is fairly small right now.
I am going to publicly call for banning user VoiceOfRa for the following reasons:
(1) VoiceOfRa is almost certainly the same person as Eugene_Nier and Azathoth123. This is well known in rationality circles; many of us have been willing to give him a second chance under a new username because he usually makes valuable contributions.
(2) VoiceOfRa almost certainly downvote bombed the user who made the grandparent comment, including downvoting some very uncontroversial and reasonable comments.
(3) As I have said before in this context, downvote abuse is very clear evidence of being mindkilled. It is also a surefire way to ensure you never change your mind, because you discourage people who disagree with you from taking part in the discussion and therefore prohibit yourself from updating on their information. I do not understand how someone who genuinely believes in epistemic rationality could think this is a good strategy.
I will also note that I was the first person to publicly call out Eugine_Nier under his previous username, Azathoth123, at http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0g/link_quotasmicroaggressionandmeritocracy/bd4o . Like I said in that comment, I continue to believe he is a valuable contributor to the community. Like many other people, I have been willing to give him a second chance under his new username. However, this was conditional on completely ceasing and desisting with the downvote abuse. And yes, any downvoting of old comments made in a different context is a clear example of abuse.
The following links provide background material for readers who are unfamiliar with Eugine_Nier and the context in which I am requesting a ban:
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/kbk/meta_policy_for_dealing_with_users/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/kfq/moderator_action_eugine_nier_is_now_banned_for/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/ld0/psa_eugine_nier_evading_ban/
Edited to add: If I see clear evidence that VoiceOfRa is not Eugine_Nier, or that he was not behind the most recent downvote abuse, I will retract this message and publicly apologize
It is clearly the same person. And yes, he’s actively trying to drive away people for disagreeing with his politics (and/or correctly predicting the presence of neo-reactionaries in a conversation, based on past experience). He also seems to use multiple sockpuppets for upvotes, although I suppose lots of people could just be functionally illiterate.
Giving him a “second” chance seems like a clear failure at reflective decision theory. The punishment should discourage the crime, not just stop the crime. So far it’s done neither.
No doubt Nier believes the whole “Cathedral” has defected against him—but unless you think he started out responding to some credible abuse on LW, I really don’t care. His beliefs are not Bayesian evidence.
If argument screens of authority (http://lesswrong.com/lw/lx/argument_screens_off_authority/), then argument clearly also screens off lack of authority. Moreover, when someone has a repeated history of making arguments that stand on their own, it would be foolish to make the claim that that person’s opinions carry a likelihood ratio of 1. Repeated history of sound arguments is pretty much the definition of authority.
I am the one who called for banning VoiceOfRa, and I stand by that judgement. It is more important to me that we don’t give veto power over who joins this community to a lone neoreactionary. However, it would be disingenious to claim that it wouldn’t be a difficult trade-off. The community would clearly lose something valuable.
I meant the implied beliefs about persecution. Though I could quibble about the rest. Again, you could think the evidence linked in the grandparent shows that LW is too rewarding of contrarianism and/or conservatism, without checking to see if a complaint is based on reality; you could also think instead that Nier is using sockpuppets to reward himself. But you can’t think everything is fine.
Why is it clearly the same person?
Here’s a start.
Ahem.
May I point out that the link above links to a post with negative karma
I decided to investigate the Voice of Ra issue after seeing an apparently baseless accusation elsewhere (not this thread) that he was downvoting retributively
The logic given in the above link for his allegedly multiple identities is extremely poor. I am entirely unconvinced and shame all those who have both accused him or naively accepted those accusations without good reason
Both his contributions that I have stumbled across in say rationality quote threads or his over all contributions are overwhelmingly high quality.
I wouldn’t go as far as to counter claim that other rationalists are retributively accusing him, since I have no reason to privellage that hypothesis. It is interesting, however, that the claim is made that it is well known that he uses multiple identities for nefarious purposes. I dare say that if it was the case that he was so dodgy, I suspect Nancy or another moderator would take action, as has been done before and has recieved considerable karma in consequence.
I call for all the accused to substantiate their claims thoroughly, or apologise to both VoiceofRa and his alleged secondary accounts.
I call for any higher status users in our community to really critically consider such claims the same way you might critically look at other privellaged areas and not accept bullying and slander where it may exist. I hope some of the unofficial LW leadership take some initiative here.
No, I don’t think so.
In the context of online debates, “actively trying to drive away” means things like threats, discussion of sexual inadequacies, and expressed desires for someone to die in a fire. That is not the case here.
And people who are that sensitive to their karma score are unlikely to be comfortable in LW anyway.
There is a huge difference between mass downvoting happening to an experienced user or to a new user. The experienced user has a lot of karma to waste; and they also have a long history of feedback that their contributions are welcomed by the community. The new user will more likely evaluate the feedback incorrectly (as a dislike by community, as opposed to by a single user who happens to be not representative of the community), and in extreme cases can even lose the ability to post.
My main concern is the abuse of downvotes against new users, which happened in the past, and where in most cases we will never know it happened, because the new users will disappear without giving feedback to the community.
As I mentioned before, this is a technical problem that should have a technical solution.
The relevant political question is how do we get the ability to do something about the code base of LW.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an efficient way to get information about karma voting patterns.
An inefficient way would do. But maybe “shockingly inefficient” is as good as it gets. The Reddit database architecture (which IIRC LW uses) is … unusual.
That seems to be factually mistaken.
You seem to be engaging in a typical mind fallacy, or some variant of it. If something doesn’t bother you, no one else should be bothered by it.
I am sure I’m not immune to the typical mind fallacy, but LW is known for not being particularly gentle with posts it disagrees with. It’s pretty far away from a circle jerk. People who are uncomfortable with disapproval are likely to find it unpleasant, regardless of whether it is expressed as a downvote or as a contrary comment.
Note that I’m not arguing that LW should deliberately drive away the thin-skinned, that’s certainly a bad idea. However I don’t think that someone who is upset by a downvote is going to react well to a comment (or two, or many) telling him he’s wrong.
The thing is, a downvote campaign isn’t just a losing a point or two, it’s more like losing 30 points for no apparent reason in a day. Or, as happened to me for a while, having a downvote appear just about as soon as I posted much of anything. I like LW pretty much, but that really did take away some of the sparkle for me.
A downvote carries much less information than a comment. It’s possible to think about whether a comment is reasonable.
I suspect that you’re underestimating the psychology behind Karma. The first time Eugine_Neir did this was a natural experiment, and we saw several very valuable members leave from the mass downvoting.
“Actively trying to drive people away” means doing something with the intention of trying to drive someone away. That could mean screaming at them, overusing the word ‘moist’, or agreeing with them when they want an argument. It could also mean downvotes. It may be hard to judge if someone is trying to drive someone away, but defaulting to “they are not openly being abusive blowhards” is not really useful unless the only thing you care about is abusive blowhards.
However, I would argue that “actively trying to drive people away” is less important that “driving away productive contributors”.
I haven’t gone back and checked, but I seem to remember hearing that Eugene_Nier, when contacted by a moderator the first time, said he was trying to drive away people that he considered unproductive. So if it’s the same person it’s likely that he still tries to drive people away.
I arrive late but with a link to the Kaj_Sotala post you’re probably thinking of:
Yes, that’s what I remembered.
If Ra sees this as a voting game, getting into politically charged arguments with newbies and then down voting them is efficient.
They give him a target that lets him post a lot of replies, and with low karma they can’t down vote him back.
He can use a second account to vote up 30% of his replies, giving him a good amount of karma at low risk of discovery.
He gets a chance to run off a newbie that doesn’t agree with him.
And we all gain from this. We don’t need users that can’t ignore a troll.
I’d rather not have a forum de facto moderated by a troll.
I don’t pay any particular attention to whom VoiceOfRa replies or does not, but it is not my impression that he specifically targets newbies. In the current case under discussion he seems to have been triggered by the phrase “misogynist asshole”.
Your sarcasm needs a lot of work :-P
Would people who think they’ve been subject to a down-voting campaign please get in touch with me?
Thank you.
(The send-a-message link is accessible by clicking on people’s names.)
I think people should vote how they believe, up or down. But I feel very strongly that we should each have 1 vote.
The accusation is not of sockpuppetry, the accusation is that VoiceOfRa downvotes comments regardless of their content as a “punishment” for the poster. It’s still one vote, but some people feel it’s… misused.
Thanks, I see. But how does one decide whether someone believes something about the comment, or is just punishing generally? I guess we might require a comment if there is a down vote? Or the moderators could look at voting patterns overall, or in special cases where attention has been called. I am new to LW so I have little sense of context.
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.
I assume the mods can easily look it up. Yo, mods, that’s true?
Is being mindkilled on a particular topic to be punished by forcible expulsion from LW? That’s… a dangerous path to take X-/
retracted
LW is one of the gentler places on the ’net and I don’t really see the need for extra shielding from a decrementing counter in a database somewhere.
Consequentially...why bother even if this is true?
Assuming you are correct, Eugene’s response to being banned (twice!) was to just make another account. It’s highly likely that if you ban this new account, he will make a fourth account. That account will quickly quickly gain karma because, as you note, Eugene’s comments are actually valuable. You are proposing that we do the same thing a third time and expect a different result.
Possible actual solutions that are way too much work:
move LW on to an Omnilibrium like system of voting where Eugene’s votes will put him strongly into the optimate cluster and won’t hurt as much.
give up on moderation democracy on the web.
My proposed solution would be something like this:
unban the Eugine_Nier account;
completely disable the Azathoth123 and VoiceOfRa account, e.g. replace their passwords with random junk and throw them away so nobody can log into them;
implement a feature whereby you cannot downvote more than X comments (or more than X’ comments by the same author) in a Y-hour period (or need to solve a captcha to do so).
My proposed solution would consist entirely of
Have an active moderator who will look at suspected cases of mass downvoting in a timely manner (and then punish the downvoter and mod up the victim again)
It is our inability to implement this solution which necessitates all the other ones.
That would be a poor use of human time. If we don’t want mass downvoting, remove the ability to do it.
We don’t want to remove the ability to do mass downvoting. If someone posts 100 random Wikipedia articles in the belief that this provides insight, they should be downvoted. What we want to do is remove the ability to do mass downvoting based on the downvoter’s motivation. No automated process can detect motivation, so we can’t do that without using a moderator.
Yes, but not necessarily by one person.
I think you may be using different definitions of “mass downvoting”. I think Jiro means downvoting many of one user’s comments with just one account. I think several people have “mass-downvoted” Clarity this week, but nobody complained.
I think someone who makes a huge mistake like posting 100 random Wikipedia articles will be sufficiently downvoted by a number of different people.
This process won’t be blocked by limiting how much individuals can downvote.
How about having a limit to what proportion of another user’s downvotes are allowed to come from one user? So if clarity gets downvoted by 20 people there are no limits to how many votes they can get from each of them, but if it is only Nier going on a spree against a new user he pretty soon runs into 5% or whatever the limit is, and then can’t downvote that user any more.
OTOH a formal definition of what qualifies as mass downvoting could prevent bickering about whether a particular instance does. Dunno if the benefits would outweigh the costs, though.
The captcha seems like a terrible solution when we have someone following Penn Jillette’s advice for stage magicians:
You’re effectively suggesting we put up a fence (to use Moody’s example) in order to show him we disapprove of what he’s doing. He already knows that.
Well, at least a captcha would prevent people from using scripts to downvote each other’s comments, but I don’t think VoiceOfRa is doing that now (though he probably was when going by Eugene Nier). But yes, blocking people altogether from casting too many downvotes would probably make more sense.
How does Omnilibrium voting work?
I’m not sure about the mathematical details, but as described in their FAQ, they presume that it’s inevitable that people will form into local Blue and Green tribes, so they attempt to cluster the population into Blue and Green to not just be a better recommendation engine to both Blues and Greens, but also calculate a nonpartisan score of upvotes by the other side and downvotes by your side.
In general, I thought this was fascinating because it gets to the heart about what voting is for on social websites. If we’re trying to build a recommendation engine, having an extremely diverse set of viewpoints is probably something that we want in the input stream of links and discussion. However, we then don’t want to have everyone’s voting then represent a single score variable, because people are different and have different worldviews. Mixing everyone’s scores together will make a homogenized mess that doesn’t really speak to anyone.
The idea of tracking partisanship not just to Bayes voting to make better recommendations to users, but to get a sense of nonpartisan quality really impressed me as an idea that’s totally obvious...in retrospect. I do wonder how well it scales, as Omnilibrium is fairly small right now.