I’m hoping that the fact that your total karma restricts the amount of downvoting that you can do would limit the usefulness of socks for this purpose. Of course there are ways to get around that, but it’s an inconvenience for the downvoters. If there looks to be a problem anyway, we’ll try to figure something out.
Are you going to be implementing a more systematic process for detecting karma abuses?
Would need to figure out one first. Many of the proposals I’ve seen so far require code changes.
Can those who have been negatively affected by this receive an adjustment?
jackk mentioned the possibility of reversing Eugine’s votes by running a script to upvote the comments that he had downvoted. We can do that if the people who were targeted have an interest in it.
It’s better than nothing, but as mentioned before, I’d prefer something that systematically eliminates the downvotes rather than upvoting over them:
Let’s say I’ve made 1600 comments, received +2400 “legitimate” upvotes, and −400 “legitimate” downvotes.
Thus, I should have a karma of 2000 (86% positive). But along comes Eugine, and downvotes everything, giving me another −1600. This puts my karma at 400 (55% positive). You then run a script to upvote everything he downvoted, giving me +1600 karma. This puts me at 2000 (66% positive).
As you can see, I’m STILL below the 70% positive that Eliezer mentioned as his intuitive threshold for “quality contributors”, even though in reality I should be well above that threshold.
This is, in fact, what pissed me off about my karmassassination in the first place—my ‘fake internet points’ don’t matter to me, but my ratio of upvotes to downvotes DOES, because I use it to track how likely it is that I have systematic flaws in my reasoning. This breaks down when the majority of my up- and down-voting comes from one or two concentrated sources, even if one of those sources is directly countering the other.
I don’t know how extensively this site’s source code has been modified from the reddit default, but in r2/models/vote.py we have:
class VotesByAccount(tdb_cassandra.DenormalizedRelation)
class LinkVotesByAccount(VotesByAccount)
class CommentVotesByAccount(VotesByAccount)
Python isn’t currently in my active language cache, so I’m a little rusty dragging through all the dependencies; I’ll try to spend this weekend getting up to speed with Python and see if I can help sort out a generic “wipe out a user’s full voting history” script that can be safely run.
jackk mentioned the possibility of reversing Eugine’s votes by running a script to upvote the comments that he had downvoted.
Villiam’s solution is better, I think. The system certainly keeps track of who downvoted what and allows reversions, because I can see and revert my own up or downvotes.
Further improvement: Remove only downvotes against users he specifically targeted. Whatever remains is probably still a valid signal. That might be a more complex script, though.
Find all sets of Eugine’s votes on comments by particular users, filter out any sets such that there are less than ten votes within that set or the ratio of upvotes to downvotes is greater than, say, 0.2, and reverse any downvotes in the remaining sets? That sounds like it should be compactly doable with SQL, although I don’t know a thing about the LW database.
Total karma won’t restrict people like Eugine at all. The vast bulk of his karma seemed to come from the monthly rationality quote threads, where ten minutes of web surfing and copy/paste can get you 10-100 positive karma. You can even loot old monthly threads if you want, people will still think it’s worth upvoting if they even remember it’s been posted before.
IMHO the monthly quote threads (and possibly other similar types of thread) should not contribute to karma total.
I’m hoping that the fact that your total karma restricts the amount of downvoting that you can do would limit the usefulness of socks for this purpose. Of course there are ways to get around that, but it’s an inconvenience for the downvoters. If there looks to be a problem anyway, we’ll try to figure something out.
Would need to figure out one first. Many of the proposals I’ve seen so far require code changes.
jackk mentioned the possibility of reversing Eugine’s votes by running a script to upvote the comments that he had downvoted. We can do that if the people who were targeted have an interest in it.
It’s better than nothing, but as mentioned before, I’d prefer something that systematically eliminates the downvotes rather than upvoting over them:
Let’s say I’ve made 1600 comments, received +2400 “legitimate” upvotes, and −400 “legitimate” downvotes.
Thus, I should have a karma of 2000 (86% positive). But along comes Eugine, and downvotes everything, giving me another −1600. This puts my karma at 400 (55% positive). You then run a script to upvote everything he downvoted, giving me +1600 karma. This puts me at 2000 (66% positive).
As you can see, I’m STILL below the 70% positive that Eliezer mentioned as his intuitive threshold for “quality contributors”, even though in reality I should be well above that threshold.
This is, in fact, what pissed me off about my karmassassination in the first place—my ‘fake internet points’ don’t matter to me, but my ratio of upvotes to downvotes DOES, because I use it to track how likely it is that I have systematic flaws in my reasoning. This breaks down when the majority of my up- and down-voting comes from one or two concentrated sources, even if one of those sources is directly countering the other.
Ah, I see. That’s a reasonable request, I’ll ask if there’s anything that can be done about it.
Places to start looking:
I don’t know how extensively this site’s source code has been modified from the reddit default, but in r2/models/vote.py we have:
Python isn’t currently in my active language cache, so I’m a little rusty dragging through all the dependencies; I’ll try to spend this weekend getting up to speed with Python and see if I can help sort out a generic “wipe out a user’s full voting history” script that can be safely run.
Villiam’s solution is better, I think. The system certainly keeps track of who downvoted what and allows reversions, because I can see and revert my own up or downvotes.
Further improvement: Remove only downvotes against users he specifically targeted. Whatever remains is probably still a valid signal. That might be a more complex script, though.
Find all sets of Eugine’s votes on comments by particular users, filter out any sets such that there are less than ten votes within that set or the ratio of upvotes to downvotes is greater than, say, 0.2, and reverse any downvotes in the remaining sets? That sounds like it should be compactly doable with SQL, although I don’t know a thing about the LW database.
That’s why I hedged a bit. I know SQL is capable of doing such a thing, but I don’t know anything about the LW database either.
Total karma won’t restrict people like Eugine at all. The vast bulk of his karma seemed to come from the monthly rationality quote threads, where ten minutes of web surfing and copy/paste can get you 10-100 positive karma. You can even loot old monthly threads if you want, people will still think it’s worth upvoting if they even remember it’s been posted before.
IMHO the monthly quote threads (and possibly other similar types of thread) should not contribute to karma total.