It looks like the person who has been downvoting you is the same person mentioned in this thread. Follow-up queries also indicated that the same person had been downvoting several others who had previously complained of downvote stalking.
The said person failed to respond to my first private message on the subject; because there’s the chance that they might have just missed it, I finally got around sending them another message yesterday, explicitly mentioning the possibility of a ban unless they provide a very good explanation within a reasonable time. I apologize for taking so long—I procrastinated on this for a while, as I find it quite uncomfortable to initiate conflict with people.
Just to encourage you, I want to put things in context:
This is one person that significantly destroys the social capital of the LW community. And in our community, social capital is scarce.
They probably do this to promote their political views; to silence perceived political opponents. (Including new users.) This is completely against LW values.
If you’d just block their account without further notice right now, I would say: “Well done!”. It is extremely generous to give them a chance to explain themselves; and there probably is no good explanation anyway, so it’s just playing for time.
I mean, really, if one person keeps terrorizing the community, and the community is unwilling to defend themselves, then all the lessons about how rationalists are supposed to win have failed.
A person who did so much damage does not deserve a second chance. If you decide to give them the second chance, I won’t complain. But I would complain against inaction while they continue to do more damage. If you are the only person who has an access to the “Ban User” button, just press it already, before everyone leaves.
EDIT: This whole thread (and it is far from being the first one) is additional damage caused by a single person. People keep proposing solutions without evidence, then they argue with each other. There is a growing frustration when they realize that most of the proposed changes won’t get implemented anyway (either because other people oppose it, or because making changes to LW codebase always takes a lot of time). We keep generating negative emotions, because… why exactly?
I mean, really, if one person keeps terrorizing the community, and the community is unwilling to defend themselves, then all the lessons about how rationalists are supposed to win have failed.
I agree, Rationalists should win! And in this case, winning doesn’t mean turning into straw-man Vulcans who say “you shouldn’t have any emotional reactions to people mass downvoting you” as I see a couple other places in this thread. Rather, it means that we should be able to design a community system that makes everyone feel cared for, and also provides them useful feedback for how they should or shouldn’t post things.
Emotions matter, and making people feel valued and loved by other members is how a community thrives. (Thats why religions can do so well even though they make silly claims about the nature of reality).
I suggest that whether they’re banned or not, unless they do provide a very good explanation their identity and a description of the mass-downvoting they’ve done should be posted on LW, and (if anyone has the bandwidth to do it) mass-downvoting should be exposed when it’s done in the future, and it should be known that it will be.
Because otherwise the obvious response to “hey, we’re banning you for abusing the system” is “OK, thanks. I’ll make another account.”.
Because otherwise the obvious response to “hey, we’re banning you for abusing the system” is “OK, thanks. I’ll make another account.”.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but given that the offender will lose > 9k Karma, and will have to grind a bit to be able to keep mass-downvoting, I’d say it is more than a trivial inconvenience.
You only need maybe 10 karma to be able to significantly hurt new users.
Maybe there should be some treshold, e.g. 100 karma before you can downvote. And then, you can downvote as much as you can today. This probably could be done by one “if” line in the code.
We need downvoting, but we don’t quite need to have new users able to destroy other new users.
is there a discussion somewhere on the relative merits of up/down-voting versus upvoting only ?
Yes, it came up here the last time someone made a Discussion post about retributive downvoting. Not to toot my own horn, but I feel I outlined some reasonable issues with that plan in my response.
(Short version: I feel that upvote-only systems encourage cliques and pandering, neither of which align well with LW’s culture or goals.)
That depends on the comment. Some comments display so much ignorance, that they deserve to be downvoted and hidden.
Imagine a new user, who would just assert that theory of relativity is wrong, and provide their own “theory” based on some mumbo-jumbo or misunderstanding of the basic concepts of physics. That specific comment deserves to be downvoted below zero. It is not a spam, it is not offensive, so it should not be reported to moderators. It is just too stupid. Zero is for the “meh” comments, this would be below that level.
This is different from mass-downvoting all comments of other users because someone does not agree with them for political reasons.
It seems to me that many people are thinking in a direction “design a system that cannot be abused, and it will not be abused”. But anything can be abused. Imagine that we would adopt a system with upvotes only, and then we would have a separate button for “report spam”. Would this be safe against abuse? A malicious user could decide to mass-report all comments of their political enemies as spam. And then, what? If the spam reports are handled automatically, it would mean that new users would suddenly find themselves blocked by the system and their comments removed. (We could make the algorithm to remove the comment only if three users report it as spam; and then the abuser creates two sockpuppet accounts.) Or if the reports are not handled automatically, then some moderator must spend hours reading them and clicking “no, this is not a spam”. At that moment, wouldn’t it be just much simpler to ban the offender? Or perhaps remove from them specifically the ability to report spam? Analogically, we can ban the user now, or perhaps make a change that will prevent this specific user from downvoting.
At this moment, there is just one specific user abusing the system. Most of the debates about whether downvotes are bad, are started by their actions. Spending energy to redesign the whole system, which works okay for N-1 users, instead of banning the 1 disruptive user, that’s a waste of everyone’s time.
Personally, I’m in favor of a system similar to stackexchange: a comment cannot be downvoted but can be “flagged as inappropriate” to draw moderator attention.
Realistically, considering how much time does it take to change anything about LW software, I don’t see it as likely.
But I can imagine that this system could work if we had multiple moderators. I mean, so the website would not be completely abandoned if one moderator spends a day offline. Also, to provide the moderators some kind of plausible deniability, so they wouldn’t feel they start a personal conflict with someone whenever they remove a comment.
Regarding changes to LW software, I think the process can be improved if the persons responsible will allow LWers with coding skills to volunteer their time.
That depends on two things we don’t have: (a) an active mod community that’s reasonably large in proportion to the userbase, and (b) a culture that accepts and ideally applauds an authoritarian approach to dealing with trolls and other assorted troublemakers.
Having the button without having the support for it is useless at best, and at worst can be actively counterproductive by creating an expectation that the mods can’t possibly meet, or by encouraging an adversarial relationship between mods and users. Scott Alexander’s got a similar system going over at slatestarcodex (which, to be fair, is excellent in terms of top-level content, and above average in terms of commentariat as long as you don’t mind the occasional insane diatribe), and it doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job of deterring the type of commentary it was instituted to prevent.
Does anyone have experience with a board that elects its mods?
I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, though it seems like it’s got some interesting complications, such has who gets to vote and keeping the voting honest—I’ve just only been on boards where the mods were chosen from the top.
Formal elections are rare, but vague consensus processes (along the lines of “anyone who cares can nominate a mod; we’ll pick whoever gets the most nods as long as they aren’t blatantly electioneering”) seem pretty common. Honestly I think I’d prefer the latter to the former.
I’ve seen a board occasionally elect a moderator (with other mods appointed). The resulting drama was way too high for whatever benefits the election may have had.
The person in question has got Rationality Quotes karma-mining down to a science. Ban them, and they’ll be back up to 5K karma on their new account within weeks.
HEY! Suggestion:
Can the Rationality Quotes threads be pulled off into their own section, where upvotes and downvotes still happen but don’t affect the user’s karma?
This makes sense for multiple reasons:
you shouldn’t get karma for just quoting things someone else said, without analysis or context; if you can’t be original, at least be relevant/topical.
it prevents karma-mining.
it keeps the Rationality Quotes threads from turning into a distracting meta-game.
It’s possible to make hundreds of karma with minutes of effort simply by copy/pasting somebody else’s awesome quote into a monthly quote thread. The amount of grinding required is paltry, and not at all a stumbling block to persistent offenders.
By “identity”, I take it you mean not merely the user name, but whatever other identifying information the mods have? I don’t understand how your second paragraph follows from your first. What is your motive for wanting the information released? If it’s retribution, that has nothing to do with your second paragraph. I don’t see a deterrence value, since anyone concerned about keeping their information private to avoid downvote stalking will presumably just not use their actual information in registering in the first place. I don’t see a preventative justification, either; if the mods can verify identity, they should just block any new account from that person, and if they can’t verify identity, then how is this an answer to people making new accounts?
I meant the user name, not any other information the moderators may have.
The second paragraph is intended to follow from the first because:
I expect posting information about mass-downvoting to reduce its effectiveness, because
people will feel less bothered by getting lots of downvotes if they know they come from a low-quality mass-downvoter
readers who know that A has been mass-downvoting B will be aware of that when looking at B’s comments and may discount downvotes on them accordingly.
I expect posting information about mass-downvoting to reduce its attractiveness, because
prospective mass-downvoters will anticipate getting exposed, with likely consequences for their own reputation (and in particular their ability to amass the karma they need for the mass-downvoting).
I expect the promise of future exposure to inhibit mass-downvoting by a further mechanism:
prospective mass-downvoters will fear that they may get not only exposed but banned, which would (at least) be an inconvenience.
Thanks for following up on this. Any possibility we can know what “within a reasonable time” means concretely? (E.g. days, weeks, months? I think a quicker resolution will be better, though I empathize with your situation.)
Yes, when it comes to instances like that and asking people to respond in a reasonable timeframe, setting is useful. It makes it easier for you to simply wait for the deadline instead of asking every day yourself: “Is enough time passed that I should do something?”
No need for a conflict or a ban, just let them know that their user name will be made public.
I find it quite uncomfortable to initiate conflict with people.
Not sure why the parent is upvoted. If you have trouble confronting people, you make a poor admin. Is there another active admin on LW who is more competent?
EDIT: I assumed too much, Kaj was probably not expected to moderate and ended up in this position by default. Sorry.
If you have trouble confronting people, you make a poor admin.
Can we please act like we actually know stuff about practical instrumental rationality given how human brains work, and not punish people for openly noticing their weaknesses.
You could have more constructively said something like “Thank you for taking on these responsibilities even though it sometimes makes you uncomfortable. I wonder if anyone else who is more comfortable with that would be willing to help out.”
not punish people for openly noticing their weaknesses.
Thanks! Yes, that’s a good point. On the other hand, willingness to confront problem users is one of the absolute minimum requirements for a forum moderator. I suppose Kaj was not expected to do the moderator’s job, probably just behind-the-scene maintenance, and I assumed too much. Sorry, Kaj!
That said, a competent active forum moderator is required to deal with this particular issue, and I am yet to see one here.
I’m brash, extroverted, outgoing, confrontative, have the subtlety of a head-on collision with a Mack truck and still find this sort of admin duty unpleasant. So this leads me to suspect it’s just horrible work.
It looks like the person who has been downvoting you is the same person mentioned in this thread. Follow-up queries also indicated that the same person had been downvoting several others who had previously complained of downvote stalking.
The said person failed to respond to my first private message on the subject; because there’s the chance that they might have just missed it, I finally got around sending them another message yesterday, explicitly mentioning the possibility of a ban unless they provide a very good explanation within a reasonable time. I apologize for taking so long—I procrastinated on this for a while, as I find it quite uncomfortable to initiate conflict with people.
Just to encourage you, I want to put things in context:
This is one person that significantly destroys the social capital of the LW community. And in our community, social capital is scarce.
They probably do this to promote their political views; to silence perceived political opponents. (Including new users.) This is completely against LW values.
If you’d just block their account without further notice right now, I would say: “Well done!”. It is extremely generous to give them a chance to explain themselves; and there probably is no good explanation anyway, so it’s just playing for time.
I mean, really, if one person keeps terrorizing the community, and the community is unwilling to defend themselves, then all the lessons about how rationalists are supposed to win have failed.
A person who did so much damage does not deserve a second chance. If you decide to give them the second chance, I won’t complain. But I would complain against inaction while they continue to do more damage. If you are the only person who has an access to the “Ban User” button, just press it already, before everyone leaves.
EDIT: This whole thread (and it is far from being the first one) is additional damage caused by a single person. People keep proposing solutions without evidence, then they argue with each other. There is a growing frustration when they realize that most of the proposed changes won’t get implemented anyway (either because other people oppose it, or because making changes to LW codebase always takes a lot of time). We keep generating negative emotions, because… why exactly?
I agree, Rationalists should win! And in this case, winning doesn’t mean turning into straw-man Vulcans who say “you shouldn’t have any emotional reactions to people mass downvoting you” as I see a couple other places in this thread. Rather, it means that we should be able to design a community system that makes everyone feel cared for, and also provides them useful feedback for how they should or shouldn’t post things.
Emotions matter, and making people feel valued and loved by other members is how a community thrives. (Thats why religions can do so well even though they make silly claims about the nature of reality).
I suggest that whether they’re banned or not, unless they do provide a very good explanation their identity and a description of the mass-downvoting they’ve done should be posted on LW, and (if anyone has the bandwidth to do it) mass-downvoting should be exposed when it’s done in the future, and it should be known that it will be.
Because otherwise the obvious response to “hey, we’re banning you for abusing the system” is “OK, thanks. I’ll make another account.”.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but given that the offender will lose > 9k Karma, and will have to grind a bit to be able to keep mass-downvoting, I’d say it is more than a trivial inconvenience.
You only need maybe 10 karma to be able to significantly hurt new users.
Maybe there should be some treshold, e.g. 100 karma before you can downvote. And then, you can downvote as much as you can today. This probably could be done by one “if” line in the code.
We need downvoting, but we don’t quite need to have new users able to destroy other new users.
Actually, I was wondering about this: do we need downvoting ?
I mean, is there a discussion somewhere on the relative merits of up/down-voting versus upvoting only ?
Yes, it came up here the last time someone made a Discussion post about retributive downvoting. Not to toot my own horn, but I feel I outlined some reasonable issues with that plan in my response.
(Short version: I feel that upvote-only systems encourage cliques and pandering, neither of which align well with LW’s culture or goals.)
Thank you !
I think downvoting is good to have, but I’m not at all sure that we need downvoting to below 0.
That depends on the comment. Some comments display so much ignorance, that they deserve to be downvoted and hidden.
Imagine a new user, who would just assert that theory of relativity is wrong, and provide their own “theory” based on some mumbo-jumbo or misunderstanding of the basic concepts of physics. That specific comment deserves to be downvoted below zero. It is not a spam, it is not offensive, so it should not be reported to moderators. It is just too stupid. Zero is for the “meh” comments, this would be below that level.
This is different from mass-downvoting all comments of other users because someone does not agree with them for political reasons.
It seems to me that many people are thinking in a direction “design a system that cannot be abused, and it will not be abused”. But anything can be abused. Imagine that we would adopt a system with upvotes only, and then we would have a separate button for “report spam”. Would this be safe against abuse? A malicious user could decide to mass-report all comments of their political enemies as spam. And then, what? If the spam reports are handled automatically, it would mean that new users would suddenly find themselves blocked by the system and their comments removed. (We could make the algorithm to remove the comment only if three users report it as spam; and then the abuser creates two sockpuppet accounts.) Or if the reports are not handled automatically, then some moderator must spend hours reading them and clicking “no, this is not a spam”. At that moment, wouldn’t it be just much simpler to ban the offender? Or perhaps remove from them specifically the ability to report spam? Analogically, we can ban the user now, or perhaps make a change that will prevent this specific user from downvoting.
At this moment, there is just one specific user abusing the system. Most of the debates about whether downvotes are bad, are started by their actions. Spending energy to redesign the whole system, which works okay for N-1 users, instead of banning the 1 disruptive user, that’s a waste of everyone’s time.
I am now convinced that going negative is useful.
What about requiring a karma payment to downvote negative?
Personally, I’m in favor of a system similar to stackexchange: a comment cannot be downvoted but can be “flagged as inappropriate” to draw moderator attention.
Realistically, considering how much time does it take to change anything about LW software, I don’t see it as likely.
But I can imagine that this system could work if we had multiple moderators. I mean, so the website would not be completely abandoned if one moderator spends a day offline. Also, to provide the moderators some kind of plausible deniability, so they wouldn’t feel they start a personal conflict with someone whenever they remove a comment.
Regarding changes to LW software, I think the process can be improved if the persons responsible will allow LWers with coding skills to volunteer their time.
It’s open source, and contributions (at least on some issues) are welcome.
Contributing to Less Wrong
Issue tracker
jackk, Vladimir, thx for commenting!
I think those links should be on the main page to be easier to discover.
Part of my job is to review pull requests.
That depends on two things we don’t have: (a) an active mod community that’s reasonably large in proportion to the userbase, and (b) a culture that accepts and ideally applauds an authoritarian approach to dealing with trolls and other assorted troublemakers.
Having the button without having the support for it is useless at best, and at worst can be actively counterproductive by creating an expectation that the mods can’t possibly meet, or by encouraging an adversarial relationship between mods and users. Scott Alexander’s got a similar system going over at slatestarcodex (which, to be fair, is excellent in terms of top-level content, and above average in terms of commentariat as long as you don’t mind the occasional insane diatribe), and it doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job of deterring the type of commentary it was instituted to prevent.
We can set up a system in which mods are elected. This might provide a sufficient amount of mods and wouldn’t be authoritarian.
Does anyone have experience with a board that elects its mods?
I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, though it seems like it’s got some interesting complications, such has who gets to vote and keeping the voting honest—I’ve just only been on boards where the mods were chosen from the top.
Formal elections are rare, but vague consensus processes (along the lines of “anyone who cares can nominate a mod; we’ll pick whoever gets the most nods as long as they aren’t blatantly electioneering”) seem pretty common. Honestly I think I’d prefer the latter to the former.
I’ve seen a board occasionally elect a moderator (with other mods appointed). The resulting drama was way too high for whatever benefits the election may have had.
AFAIK, Wikipedia and StackExchange use elected mods. They don’t seem to be faring too bad.
The person in question has got Rationality Quotes karma-mining down to a science. Ban them, and they’ll be back up to 5K karma on their new account within weeks.
HEY! Suggestion:
Can the Rationality Quotes threads be pulled off into their own section, where upvotes and downvotes still happen but don’t affect the user’s karma?
This makes sense for multiple reasons:
you shouldn’t get karma for just quoting things someone else said, without analysis or context; if you can’t be original, at least be relevant/topical.
it prevents karma-mining.
it keeps the Rationality Quotes threads from turning into a distracting meta-game.
So that’s the trick!
It’s possible to make hundreds of karma with minutes of effort simply by copy/pasting somebody else’s awesome quote into a monthly quote thread. The amount of grinding required is paltry, and not at all a stumbling block to persistent offenders.
By “identity”, I take it you mean not merely the user name, but whatever other identifying information the mods have? I don’t understand how your second paragraph follows from your first. What is your motive for wanting the information released? If it’s retribution, that has nothing to do with your second paragraph. I don’t see a deterrence value, since anyone concerned about keeping their information private to avoid downvote stalking will presumably just not use their actual information in registering in the first place. I don’t see a preventative justification, either; if the mods can verify identity, they should just block any new account from that person, and if they can’t verify identity, then how is this an answer to people making new accounts?
I meant the user name, not any other information the moderators may have.
The second paragraph is intended to follow from the first because:
I expect posting information about mass-downvoting to reduce its effectiveness, because
people will feel less bothered by getting lots of downvotes if they know they come from a low-quality mass-downvoter
readers who know that A has been mass-downvoting B will be aware of that when looking at B’s comments and may discount downvotes on them accordingly.
I expect posting information about mass-downvoting to reduce its attractiveness, because
prospective mass-downvoters will anticipate getting exposed, with likely consequences for their own reputation (and in particular their ability to amass the karma they need for the mass-downvoting).
I expect the promise of future exposure to inhibit mass-downvoting by a further mechanism:
prospective mass-downvoters will fear that they may get not only exposed but banned, which would (at least) be an inconvenience.
Thanks for following up on this. Any possibility we can know what “within a reasonable time” means concretely? (E.g. days, weeks, months? I think a quicker resolution will be better, though I empathize with your situation.)
Around a week.
Yes, when it comes to instances like that and asking people to respond in a reasonable timeframe, setting is useful. It makes it easier for you to simply wait for the deadline instead of asking every day yourself: “Is enough time passed that I should do something?”
No need for a conflict or a ban, just let them know that their user name will be made public.
Not sure why the parent is upvoted. If you have trouble confronting people, you make a poor admin. Is there another active admin on LW who is more competent?
EDIT: I assumed too much, Kaj was probably not expected to moderate and ended up in this position by default. Sorry.
Can we please act like we actually know stuff about practical instrumental rationality given how human brains work, and not punish people for openly noticing their weaknesses.
You could have more constructively said something like “Thank you for taking on these responsibilities even though it sometimes makes you uncomfortable. I wonder if anyone else who is more comfortable with that would be willing to help out.”
Thanks! Yes, that’s a good point. On the other hand, willingness to confront problem users is one of the absolute minimum requirements for a forum moderator. I suppose Kaj was not expected to do the moderator’s job, probably just behind-the-scene maintenance, and I assumed too much. Sorry, Kaj!
That said, a competent active forum moderator is required to deal with this particular issue, and I am yet to see one here.
Preferably more than one moderator.
Quoting from the other thread about downvote stalking:
No problem. :-)
I’m brash, extroverted, outgoing, confrontative, have the subtlety of a head-on collision with a Mack truck and still find this sort of admin duty unpleasant. So this leads me to suspect it’s just horrible work.