I seem to be the lone dissenter here, but I am unhappy about the ban. Not that it is unjustified, it definitely is. However, it does not address the main issue (until jackk fiddles with karma): preventing Eugine from mass downvoting. So this is mainly retribution, rather than remediation, which seems anti-rational to me, if emotionally satisfying, as one of the victims.
Imagine for a moment that Eugine did not engage in mass downvoting. He would be a valuable regular on this site. I recall dozens of insightful comments he made (and dozens of poor ones, of course, but who am I to point fingers), and I only stopped engaging him in the comments after his mass-downvoting habits were brought to light for the first time. So, I would rather see him exposed and dekarmified, but allowed to participate.
TL;DR: banning is a wrong decision, should have been exposed and stripped of the ability of downvote instead. Optionally, all his votes ever could have been reversed, unless it’s hard.
EDIT: apparently not the lone dissenter, just the first to speak up.
This should be considered as a possibly better solution. People who can’t be trusted with algorithmic control of visibility of others’ posts may still have worthwhile posts of their own to contribute.
That said, I’m not sure I can wholeheartedly endorse it. Well-kept gardens die by pacifism. A person who has demonstrated active hostility toward others in the community perhaps shouldn’t be regarded as a good-faith contributor. Kaj has construed this as a harassment problem rather than a bad data problem — it’s not that Eugine was feeding erroneous data into a ranking algorithm whose output we care about; it’s that he was (admittedly) trying to drive people off the site whom he didn’t approve of.
Right. And it seems like a non-central application of the harassment clause. As a result, he applied the measures standard for a harassment, which are not the best ones in this situation.
Part of the problem is that the cited policy is phrased as a nonbinding “deletion policy” (a discussion of cases when moderators might delete posts or comments) and not a “conduct policy” (discussing acceptable use of the site in general). The closest we seem to have to the latter is the “Site Etiquette and Social Norms” section of the FAQ, which does discuss some unacceptable uses of the voting mechanism but does not contemplate that someone might go so far as to use it to intentionally drive users off the site. That may not be a failure of imagination — it may be an avoidance of the “Don’t stuff beans up your nose!” problem. Spelling out lots of ways to abuse the system provides a malicious or mischievous user with a list of things to do.
In any event, it’s a bad idea to cooperate with a defectbot.
In this case, many people had already expressed strong confidence that Eugine was a major source of mass downvoting- some we’re quite certain of that and said so publicly. So it doesn’t look like that matters.
He didn’t just mass downvote. He purposefully attempted to remove other contributing members from the community. He also did not confess to it indicating both dishonesty and that he was aware that his actions were unacceptable. He also multi-accounted and still does and posts absolutely disgusting and logic-free racial comments and trolling (referring to black scientists to “dancing bears.” You’re welcome to demonstrate what’s rational or constructive about that).
You don’t just undo those actions, you punish the person who takes part in them in order to deter the action occurring in the future. So that there can be civil discourse going forward. This is rational and a standard part of human social requirements.
He purposefully attempted to remove other contributing members from the community. He also did not confess to it
Never publicly, but I believe that (when he was posting as “Eugine Nier”) a moderator did question him privately about it and he said that was his intention.
Yes, he confessed to it when confronted. My understanding was that there were posts about mass downvoting and people asking who was doing it and if it was happening and he never admitted it or posted in them to confirm it, whereas if he thought it was okay there was no reason for him not to.
I’m also unhappy with him being banned from commenting but not downvoting. While I frequently found his comments obnoxious and annoying in their connotations, they definitely served a net positive on the site.
That said, his moderation practices clearly served a larger net negative, so if there are technical reasons why it’s difficult to undo his moderation and ban him from moderating in the future, I suppose this is the best we can get.
I’m glad this was done, if only to send a signal to the community that something is being done, but you have a point that this is not an ideal solution and I hope a better one is implemented soon.
EDIT: apparently not the lone dissenter, just the first to speak up.
Yup, I endorse this. (Pretty sure I’ve been one of Eugine Nier’s targets at one time or another.) I am wary of silencing those who don’t share my politics (even if they stink up the joint with links to Vox Day).
So, I would rather see him exposed and dekarmified, but allowed to participate.
If it were technically feasible, I’d say let him keep the karma score, just throttle or cut off his downvote button.
That said, I also endorse this:
Thanks, Kaj, you are a hero!!!
And this:
So far I think Kaj has handled this well, whether or not I agree with the specific punishment handed down. He’s acted with both weight and care.
The ban made me uncomfortable, and the talk of Eugine as being “guilty” makes me even more uncomfortable. My take:
Perfect is the enemy of the good. If we expect massive downvoting to be a recurring problem, then maybe it would have been worth waiting until the development of non-voting accounts or dekarmification mechanisms. As an ad hoc solution to the problem du jour, banning a user is fine.
I guess the question is whether someone who took action by themselves to mass down vote for the express purpose of removing other users from the site would stop simply because his primary method was removed.
If I were doing the down-voting, and was then de-karmified, it would be the next logical step to find another way around the system such that I could continue my actions without the use of karma.
Hopefully, preventing him from commenting will mean that he begins to be less personally invested in the comment threads on the site, and thus more likely to spend his time doing other stuff instead of downvoting comments.
I seem to be the lone dissenter here, but I am unhappy about the ban.
I am also a lone dissenter who is unhappy about the ban.
Why not just ban him from further karma voting? Why ban him from posting? His posts and comments were good enough to get him plenty of karma which was required for him to even mass downvote other people in the first place.
They are quite capable of removing all his karma, or even setting it very negative, which would remove his ability to downvote. To the extent there are technical problems, they could give him a temporary ban while these are worked out.
Perma-ban is a deliberate choice by the moderator(s), not something they were forced into.
Below some negative karma threshold, there is a forced delay between comments (after posting a comment you have to wait a few minutes before you can post again).
Hi. I don’t care about karma very much (and thus about downvoting). I am ok with my comments standing on merits not on numbers, and people using my name rather than a number as a quality shortcut if they really want one.
I am perfectly happy to see that dude “not here,” just based on the type of dude he is (not even based on his ideas). These types of dudes will ruin a community in a hurry, both by attracting more like themselves, and encouraging the more reasonable to leave. This is why I kept saying he needs to find another place on the internet to debate his politics.
I have zero (0) problems with virtue ethical banning.
He would be a valuable regular on this site. I recall dozens of insightful comments he made
As long as we’re giving opinions on that: While many of his comments were interesting in an idiosyncratic, contrarian sort of way, I can’t claim I’ve ever actually gained any insight from any of his comments.
I agree that the ban won’t help, though—what has happened is just a natural consequence of people upvoting “interesting” instead of “rationality-improving” (which, paradoxically seems to have created userbase shifts which cause things to ultimately be less interesting)
A decent fraction of his posts hard hitting and solid, usually saying something in a way that clearly and effectively got the point across. However, a much larger fraction of his posts were one-liner quips and thinly disguised political screeds. I ended up downvoting more than upvoting, but I did upvote.
To be honest, I think people enjoyed his style more than his substance.
The core lesswrong community (at least, back when I was more active) don’t downvote to disagree. They upvote when something is thought provoking (as contrarian politics tends to be), they upvote novelty (again, contrarian politics) and they are more tolerant of critical tones than other parts of the net.
So even though there wasn’t much true insight and most people disagree with most of his opinions, it was interesting enough to read. I know I really enjoyed the influx of reactionaries for the first few months because it was a new and exciting thing...but then it kind of got tiresome—especially when reactionary voices started dominating completely unrelated conversations and influencing votes completely out of proportion to the number of members who actually held those views. Somehow, the reactionary users we had were also among the most active users, and naturally, they liked talking about politics.
(Please note: While I did not explicitly say it, the above implies by connotation that Nier and his unethical practices are reflective of reactionaries in general. This is unintentional. What I AM saying is that the reason Neir was upvoted is the same reason that reactionaries were upvoted, and the things I disliked about Nier’s writings is the same thing that I dislike about many but certainly not all of the reactionary user’s writings—in short, compelling style and novelty but failure to use parsimony and substance, too much confidence in opinions reached via long chains of mostly inference—even when they wrote on non-political topics. What I’m NOT saying is that all reactionary users are behaving unethically in the manner of Neir.)
His stuff was occasionally interestingly contrarian. I think it’s useful to have a few people around with political/social opinions outside the usual LW space of lukewarm leftist to libertarian to technocrat, if only to help avoid groupthink.
On the other hand, while it’s nice to have someone to point out that the emperor is naked, it usually needs to be done in a way that’s relatively hard to dismiss as a hateful diatribe.
I seem to be the lone dissenter here, but I am unhappy about the ban. Not that it is unjustified, it definitely is. However, it does not address the main issue (until jackk fiddles with karma): preventing Eugine from mass downvoting. So this is mainly retribution, rather than remediation, which seems anti-rational to me, if emotionally satisfying, as one of the victims.
Imagine for a moment that Eugine did not engage in mass downvoting. He would be a valuable regular on this site. I recall dozens of insightful comments he made (and dozens of poor ones, of course, but who am I to point fingers), and I only stopped engaging him in the comments after his mass-downvoting habits were brought to light for the first time. So, I would rather see him exposed and dekarmified, but allowed to participate.
TL;DR: banning is a wrong decision, should have been exposed and stripped of the ability of downvote instead. Optionally, all his votes ever could have been reversed, unless it’s hard.
EDIT: apparently not the lone dissenter, just the first to speak up.
This should be considered as a possibly better solution. People who can’t be trusted with algorithmic control of visibility of others’ posts may still have worthwhile posts of their own to contribute.
That said, I’m not sure I can wholeheartedly endorse it. Well-kept gardens die by pacifism. A person who has demonstrated active hostility toward others in the community perhaps shouldn’t be regarded as a good-faith contributor. Kaj has construed this as a harassment problem rather than a bad data problem — it’s not that Eugine was feeding erroneous data into a ranking algorithm whose output we care about; it’s that he was (admittedly) trying to drive people off the site whom he didn’t approve of.
Right. And it seems like a non-central application of the harassment clause. As a result, he applied the measures standard for a harassment, which are not the best ones in this situation.
Part of the problem is that the cited policy is phrased as a nonbinding “deletion policy” (a discussion of cases when moderators might delete posts or comments) and not a “conduct policy” (discussing acceptable use of the site in general). The closest we seem to have to the latter is the “Site Etiquette and Social Norms” section of the FAQ, which does discuss some unacceptable uses of the voting mechanism but does not contemplate that someone might go so far as to use it to intentionally drive users off the site. That may not be a failure of imagination — it may be an avoidance of the “Don’t stuff beans up your nose!” problem. Spelling out lots of ways to abuse the system provides a malicious or mischievous user with a list of things to do.
In any event, it’s a bad idea to cooperate with a defectbot.
Retribution can serve as deterrence.
Yep, suboptimal in many cases but often better than nothing.
Wrong comparison. I was not proposing doing nothing. Making the culprit’s name public should have been the first step.
In this case, many people had already expressed strong confidence that Eugine was a major source of mass downvoting- some we’re quite certain of that and said so publicly. So it doesn’t look like that matters.
It was public, several times over.
The suspicion was public, sure. There was no official confirmation and no indication that Eugene is the only one.
He didn’t just mass downvote. He purposefully attempted to remove other contributing members from the community. He also did not confess to it indicating both dishonesty and that he was aware that his actions were unacceptable. He also multi-accounted and still does and posts absolutely disgusting and logic-free racial comments and trolling (referring to black scientists to “dancing bears.” You’re welcome to demonstrate what’s rational or constructive about that).
You don’t just undo those actions, you punish the person who takes part in them in order to deter the action occurring in the future. So that there can be civil discourse going forward. This is rational and a standard part of human social requirements.
Never publicly, but I believe that (when he was posting as “Eugine Nier”) a moderator did question him privately about it and he said that was his intention.
Yes, he confessed to it when confronted. My understanding was that there were posts about mass downvoting and people asking who was doing it and if it was happening and he never admitted it or posted in them to confirm it, whereas if he thought it was okay there was no reason for him not to.
I’m also unhappy with him being banned from commenting but not downvoting. While I frequently found his comments obnoxious and annoying in their connotations, they definitely served a net positive on the site.
That said, his moderation practices clearly served a larger net negative, so if there are technical reasons why it’s difficult to undo his moderation and ban him from moderating in the future, I suppose this is the best we can get.
I think the end goal is to stop him from down-voting as well as commenting as mentioned in the last sentence of the post.
I’m glad this was done, if only to send a signal to the community that something is being done, but you have a point that this is not an ideal solution and I hope a better one is implemented soon.
Yup, I endorse this. (Pretty sure I’ve been one of Eugine Nier’s targets at one time or another.) I am wary of silencing those who don’t share my politics (even if they stink up the joint with links to Vox Day).
If it were technically feasible, I’d say let him keep the karma score, just throttle or cut off his downvote button.
That said, I also endorse this:
And this:
The ban made me uncomfortable, and the talk of Eugine as being “guilty” makes me even more uncomfortable. My take:
Perfect is the enemy of the good. If we expect massive downvoting to be a recurring problem, then maybe it would have been worth waiting until the development of non-voting accounts or dekarmification mechanisms. As an ad hoc solution to the problem du jour, banning a user is fine.
I guess the question is whether someone who took action by themselves to mass down vote for the express purpose of removing other users from the site would stop simply because his primary method was removed.
If I were doing the down-voting, and was then de-karmified, it would be the next logical step to find another way around the system such that I could continue my actions without the use of karma.
Hopefully, preventing him from commenting will mean that he begins to be less personally invested in the comment threads on the site, and thus more likely to spend his time doing other stuff instead of downvoting comments.
I am also a lone dissenter who is unhappy about the ban.
Why not just ban him from further karma voting? Why ban him from posting? His posts and comments were good enough to get him plenty of karma which was required for him to even mass downvote other people in the first place.
As the topic seems to imply: they don’t actually seem to have a way to keep him from using his karma.
They are quite capable of removing all his karma, or even setting it very negative, which would remove his ability to downvote. To the extent there are technical problems, they could give him a temporary ban while these are worked out.
Perma-ban is a deliberate choice by the moderator(s), not something they were forced into.
By the way, what are the consequences of low karma? Not being able to downvote, not being able to post articles… anything else?
Below some negative karma threshold, there is a forced delay between comments (after posting a comment you have to wait a few minutes before you can post again).
Hi. I don’t care about karma very much (and thus about downvoting). I am ok with my comments standing on merits not on numbers, and people using my name rather than a number as a quality shortcut if they really want one.
I am perfectly happy to see that dude “not here,” just based on the type of dude he is (not even based on his ideas). These types of dudes will ruin a community in a hurry, both by attracting more like themselves, and encouraging the more reasonable to leave. This is why I kept saying he needs to find another place on the internet to debate his politics.
I have zero (0) problems with virtue ethical banning.
As long as we’re giving opinions on that: While many of his comments were interesting in an idiosyncratic, contrarian sort of way, I can’t claim I’ve ever actually gained any insight from any of his comments.
I agree that the ban won’t help, though—what has happened is just a natural consequence of people upvoting “interesting” instead of “rationality-improving” (which, paradoxically seems to have created userbase shifts which cause things to ultimately be less interesting)
I’ve wondered about what those who liked about Nier’s contributions liked about them. Was he doing decent work on the technical topics I don’t follow?
A decent fraction of his posts hard hitting and solid, usually saying something in a way that clearly and effectively got the point across. However, a much larger fraction of his posts were one-liner quips and thinly disguised political screeds. I ended up downvoting more than upvoting, but I did upvote.
To be honest, I think people enjoyed his style more than his substance.
The core lesswrong community (at least, back when I was more active) don’t downvote to disagree. They upvote when something is thought provoking (as contrarian politics tends to be), they upvote novelty (again, contrarian politics) and they are more tolerant of critical tones than other parts of the net.
So even though there wasn’t much true insight and most people disagree with most of his opinions, it was interesting enough to read. I know I really enjoyed the influx of reactionaries for the first few months because it was a new and exciting thing...but then it kind of got tiresome—especially when reactionary voices started dominating completely unrelated conversations and influencing votes completely out of proportion to the number of members who actually held those views. Somehow, the reactionary users we had were also among the most active users, and naturally, they liked talking about politics.
(Please note: While I did not explicitly say it, the above implies by connotation that Nier and his unethical practices are reflective of reactionaries in general. This is unintentional. What I AM saying is that the reason Neir was upvoted is the same reason that reactionaries were upvoted, and the things I disliked about Nier’s writings is the same thing that I dislike about many but certainly not all of the reactionary user’s writings—in short, compelling style and novelty but failure to use parsimony and substance, too much confidence in opinions reached via long chains of mostly inference—even when they wrote on non-political topics. What I’m NOT saying is that all reactionary users are behaving unethically in the manner of Neir.)
His stuff was occasionally interestingly contrarian. I think it’s useful to have a few people around with political/social opinions outside the usual LW space of lukewarm leftist to libertarian to technocrat, if only to help avoid groupthink.
On the other hand, while it’s nice to have someone to point out that the emperor is naked, it usually needs to be done in a way that’s relatively hard to dismiss as a hateful diatribe.
Agreed. Though, getting any change to this site (minor or major) has proven to be extremely difficult.
I approve of this step over nothing, though I do hope dekarmification does happen.