Would it be problematic to put a blanket ban on upvotes and downvotes of posts that are older than 30 days? Changes in karma to old posts are no longer an especially useful signal to their author anyway. Such a ban could be a cheap way to mitigate downvote stalking without significantly impacting current discussions.
An attacker could still use multiple accounts to mass-downvote everything from a user in the past 30 days. On the other hand, it’s possible that some users’ comments were uniformly bad. For the purpose of providing a useful signal, I think we only need enough downvotes to go just a bit negative. People respond disproportionately strongly to loss than to gain, after all! The karma of a particular comment could be capped at no worse than, say, −3, regardless of how many downvotes it received. That would be a cheap way to reduce the possibility of malicious mass-downvoting.
Would it be problematic to put a blanket ban on upvotes and downvotes of posts that are older than 30 days?
This is one of those little things I really like about LW; I would miss it if it was gone. The best content here is on posts that are years old, and discouraging discussion/engagement there would just make the current content problem worse.
The karma of a particular comment could be capped at no worse than, say, −3, regardless of how many downvotes it received. That would be a cheap way to reduce the possibility of malicious mass-downvoting.
This doesn’t do anything to solve the problem of one mass-downvoter.
The best content here is on posts that are years old, and discouraging discussion/engagement there would just make the current content problem worse.
To be sure, commenting on old posts is great. That definitely shouldn’t be banned. It’s not so clear about the karma system, which serves several functions, one of which is signalling “more like this” or “less like this” in varying degrees to users so that they can modify their commenting habits. For you and all those who value upvoting/downvoting old comments for its function of engaging with old conversations, perhaps there could be an alternative course between banning late votes and maintaining the status quo? For instance, the upvote/downvote buttons could still increment/decrement scores on comments after 30 days, but not the karma of the commenters. Since a commenter would still have to look back through their old posts to notice the change anyway, the signalling effect would remain unchanged from the status quo, but the possibility of using old posts to attack karma would be removed. (Downside: karma wouldn’t be the sum of comment scores.)
This doesn’t do anything to solve the problem of one mass-downvoter.
Right, the problem it was stated to mitigate is that “An attacker could still use multiple accounts to mass-downvote everything from a user in the past 30 days.” I forgot to state but also intended it as helping with the problem Ander brought up in the OP that getting a single comment massively downvoted has discouraged people from staying around LW.
Jiro correctly pointed out below that vigilence is the technologically simplest solution, albeit more laborious for everyone involved. My preference would be a community that prevented the problem rather than punished it afterwards. There’s no guarantee that there exists a rule that would be the perfect solution, but no doubt we can come up with simple rules that put trivial inconveniences (or nontrivial ones) in the way of undesirable behavior! There are probably many such imperfect-but-helpful rules.
The simplest solution would be
1) to show the names of downvoters and
2) to have moderators who are willing to kick people out for abusive downvoting
1) could be dispensed with if users could ask moderators to look for abusive downvoting and publicize the name, but that would be more work for moderators.
Well, I don’t think that’d have most of the social effects that make me think open votes are a bad idea. It does have some odd features, though—not everyone votes (or indeed contributes) at the same rate, so a prolific contributor with perfectly normal voting habits might end up being flagged over a less prolific retributive downvoter. Not that looking at downvote ratios would be much better—those would be fairly easy to mask. Either option would be a disincentive to downvoting in general, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
Still, this doesn’t strike me as an obviously bad idea. I’d probably prefer something more narrowly targeted at retributive behavior, but if that’s not in the cards this might be a good option.
A variation on NancyLebovitz’s idea: instead of listing individual users with the most downvotes in the past month, list the pairs of users A & B with the highest number of downvotes given by A to B in the past month. With the latter, merely prolific users should rank visibly below the blanket downvoters.
On the technical solution side, how feasible would it be to institute a more complex karma aggregation algorithm, with diminishing effects from repeated downvotes from the same user?
Would it be problematic to put a blanket ban on upvotes and downvotes of posts that are older than 30 days? Changes in karma to old posts are no longer an especially useful signal to their author anyway. Such a ban could be a cheap way to mitigate downvote stalking without significantly impacting current discussions.
An attacker could still use multiple accounts to mass-downvote everything from a user in the past 30 days. On the other hand, it’s possible that some users’ comments were uniformly bad. For the purpose of providing a useful signal, I think we only need enough downvotes to go just a bit negative. People respond disproportionately strongly to loss than to gain, after all! The karma of a particular comment could be capped at no worse than, say, −3, regardless of how many downvotes it received. That would be a cheap way to reduce the possibility of malicious mass-downvoting.
This is one of those little things I really like about LW; I would miss it if it was gone. The best content here is on posts that are years old, and discouraging discussion/engagement there would just make the current content problem worse.
This doesn’t do anything to solve the problem of one mass-downvoter.
To be sure, commenting on old posts is great. That definitely shouldn’t be banned. It’s not so clear about the karma system, which serves several functions, one of which is signalling “more like this” or “less like this” in varying degrees to users so that they can modify their commenting habits. For you and all those who value upvoting/downvoting old comments for its function of engaging with old conversations, perhaps there could be an alternative course between banning late votes and maintaining the status quo? For instance, the upvote/downvote buttons could still increment/decrement scores on comments after 30 days, but not the karma of the commenters. Since a commenter would still have to look back through their old posts to notice the change anyway, the signalling effect would remain unchanged from the status quo, but the possibility of using old posts to attack karma would be removed. (Downside: karma wouldn’t be the sum of comment scores.)
Right, the problem it was stated to mitigate is that “An attacker could still use multiple accounts to mass-downvote everything from a user in the past 30 days.” I forgot to state but also intended it as helping with the problem Ander brought up in the OP that getting a single comment massively downvoted has discouraged people from staying around LW.
Jiro correctly pointed out below that vigilence is the technologically simplest solution, albeit more laborious for everyone involved. My preference would be a community that prevented the problem rather than punished it afterwards. There’s no guarantee that there exists a rule that would be the perfect solution, but no doubt we can come up with simple rules that put trivial inconveniences (or nontrivial ones) in the way of undesirable behavior! There are probably many such imperfect-but-helpful rules.
The simplest solution would be 1) to show the names of downvoters and 2) to have moderators who are willing to kick people out for abusive downvoting
1) could be dispensed with if users could ask moderators to look for abusive downvoting and publicize the name, but that would be more work for moderators.
Having a “gave most downvotes in the past month” list (with the numbers of downvotes, of course) would be awesome.
Well, I don’t think that’d have most of the social effects that make me think open votes are a bad idea. It does have some odd features, though—not everyone votes (or indeed contributes) at the same rate, so a prolific contributor with perfectly normal voting habits might end up being flagged over a less prolific retributive downvoter. Not that looking at downvote ratios would be much better—those would be fairly easy to mask. Either option would be a disincentive to downvoting in general, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
Still, this doesn’t strike me as an obviously bad idea. I’d probably prefer something more narrowly targeted at retributive behavior, but if that’s not in the cards this might be a good option.
A variation on NancyLebovitz’s idea: instead of listing individual users with the most downvotes in the past month, list the pairs of users A & B with the highest number of downvotes given by A to B in the past month. With the latter, merely prolific users should rank visibly below the blanket downvoters.
On the technical solution side, how feasible would it be to institute a more complex karma aggregation algorithm, with diminishing effects from repeated downvotes from the same user?