Maybe not everybody agrees that a ban was reasonable, but a unified front is the higher value, so rather than speak against a heavy handed response silence is just good etiquette.
The silence started even before the ban was made. Kaj asked for community input and at that point Eliezer could have simply said: “Kaj, I trust you to do what’s right on the issue.” That would have made Kaj’s job easier. Especially given what Kaj wrote on facebook over his own emotional state, that would have been a nice thing to do.
I don’t think silence means that there’s a unified front. To the extend that a unified front is high value, Eliezer could have said: “Hey, I like it that Kaj has taken action on this issue.”
Not counting months of silence while people whined about mass downvoting in open threads.
I like it that Kaj took action on this issue. The trouble was that there was nothing obvious for me to do that didn’t require programmer actions; I didn’t know how to reverse Nier’s downvotes or prevent him from downvoting further. I have not been putting heavy attention into moderating LW and I don’t personally know how to use the more complicated moderation tools.
I do however know how to click “Ban” when Will Newsome tests the limits of LW’s tolerance for crap, and it’s upvoted to 7 points and I don’t trust that Newsome isn’t using sockpuppets to upvote.
I didn’t know how to reverse Nier’s downvotes or prevent him from downvoting further.
Is it not possible for an administrator to log on as a particular user?
Because if it is, the mechanism to stop further downvoting, stop further posting, and reverse unwanted downvotes is to
1) have administrator log on as Nier
2) administrator then changes password of account to something Nier doesn’t know
3) administrator then goes to list of comments of mass-downvote victims and undownvotes all the comments
Is it not possible for an administrator to log on as a particular user?
I didn’t think it was possible to suggest something that I would think was “too much power for admins”, but congratulations, that strikes me as too much power for admins.
I didn’t think it was possible to suggest something that I would think was “too much power for admins”, but congratulations, that strikes me as too much power for admins.
Well it wasn’t a suggestion, it was a question.
I have had accounts on many systems (and still do) where if I forget my password, sysadmins reset my password. Since sysadmins can reset my password, they could if they wanted to then log on as me, set my password to something I didn’t know and then own my account.
Whether or not this is too much power for them is besides the point that this is how it works on systems that I use. In the naivete of my limited experience, I asked if it worked that way here. The closest to an answer to my question I have gotten was on another thread where I thought the answer I got was “yes its possible.”
All the other responses I’ve gotten to my question were to be voted down or congratulated for suggesting something negative as if asking a question was somehow a suggestion.
Afaik, the usual state of affairs is that admins can set a new password, but they can’t view the current password, so they couldn’t change it back and you would know that your password was changed.
so they couldn’t change it back and you would know that your password was changed.
Which of course in the case that you are trying to shut down account access for someone and to reverse downvotes for that someone without deleting their account, is absolutely perfect.
Is it not possible for an administrator to reset a user’s password? Would that be insane? If not, what happens when somebody forgets their password, is the account just dead in the water?
Because if it is possible for an administrator to reset a password, then it is possible for an administrator to log on to a particular account.
SO we can state that we do not have the technology to stop a banned user from downvoting posts, and we don’t have the technology to reverse banned downvotes.
But we do actually have the technology, it is just considered a “severe breach of privacy” to employ it?
And so we have to pretend that accomplishing the identical result by some hacky code into the database to get the same effect on the database is any more or less a breach of privacy, even though it is (potentially) bit-wise identical to just using the simple technology of logging on as the user who’s account needsd adjusting, and changing the banned user’s password so he can’t use the account he is banned from?
Is this some wierd signalling thing, where the appearance that something is really something else is more important than the actuality of it?
Does it seem irrational to anyone else here to say
“We don’t know how to prevent this person from using his account to post new downvotes and we don’t know how to reverse the downvotes already posted”
when the actual situation is
“We could stop this account from posting new downvotes with 5 minutes of admin-effort and we could reverse the effects of the mass-downvoting with about an hour of admin-effort without having to write a line of new code, but we won’t.”
This is somewhat tangential, but neatly links the two recent dramas: I was actually one of the first people subjected to campaigns of mass downvoting, having had hundreds of my comments downvoted in bunches on multiple occasions. Although there are exceptions, from what I’ve seen the well-intentioned extremists who unscrupulously abuse the karma system have generally done so in defense of your well-kept garden.
Maybe not everybody agrees that a ban was reasonable, but a unified front is the higher value, so rather than speak against a heavy handed response silence is just good etiquette.
The silence started even before the ban was made. Kaj asked for community input and at that point Eliezer could have simply said: “Kaj, I trust you to do what’s right on the issue.” That would have made Kaj’s job easier. Especially given what Kaj wrote on facebook over his own emotional state, that would have been a nice thing to do.
I don’t think silence means that there’s a unified front. To the extend that a unified front is high value, Eliezer could have said: “Hey, I like it that Kaj has taken action on this issue.”
Not counting months of silence while people whined about mass downvoting in open threads.
I like it that Kaj took action on this issue. The trouble was that there was nothing obvious for me to do that didn’t require programmer actions; I didn’t know how to reverse Nier’s downvotes or prevent him from downvoting further. I have not been putting heavy attention into moderating LW and I don’t personally know how to use the more complicated moderation tools.
I do however know how to click “Ban” when Will Newsome tests the limits of LW’s tolerance for crap, and it’s upvoted to 7 points and I don’t trust that Newsome isn’t using sockpuppets to upvote.
Is it not possible for an administrator to log on as a particular user?
Because if it is, the mechanism to stop further downvoting, stop further posting, and reverse unwanted downvotes is to
1) have administrator log on as Nier 2) administrator then changes password of account to something Nier doesn’t know 3) administrator then goes to list of comments of mass-downvote victims and undownvotes all the comments
I didn’t think it was possible to suggest something that I would think was “too much power for admins”, but congratulations, that strikes me as too much power for admins.
Well it wasn’t a suggestion, it was a question.
I have had accounts on many systems (and still do) where if I forget my password, sysadmins reset my password. Since sysadmins can reset my password, they could if they wanted to then log on as me, set my password to something I didn’t know and then own my account.
Whether or not this is too much power for them is besides the point that this is how it works on systems that I use. In the naivete of my limited experience, I asked if it worked that way here. The closest to an answer to my question I have gotten was on another thread where I thought the answer I got was “yes its possible.”
All the other responses I’ve gotten to my question were to be voted down or congratulated for suggesting something negative as if asking a question was somehow a suggestion.
Afaik, the usual state of affairs is that admins can set a new password, but they can’t view the current password, so they couldn’t change it back and you would know that your password was changed.
Which of course in the case that you are trying to shut down account access for someone and to reverse downvotes for that someone without deleting their account, is absolutely perfect.
That would be insane.
Is it not possible for an administrator to reset a user’s password? Would that be insane? If not, what happens when somebody forgets their password, is the account just dead in the water?
Because if it is possible for an administrator to reset a password, then it is possible for an administrator to log on to a particular account.
Yes, it’s technically possible, but actually doing it would be a rather severe breach of privacy...
SO we can state that we do not have the technology to stop a banned user from downvoting posts, and we don’t have the technology to reverse banned downvotes.
But we do actually have the technology, it is just considered a “severe breach of privacy” to employ it?
And so we have to pretend that accomplishing the identical result by some hacky code into the database to get the same effect on the database is any more or less a breach of privacy, even though it is (potentially) bit-wise identical to just using the simple technology of logging on as the user who’s account needsd adjusting, and changing the banned user’s password so he can’t use the account he is banned from?
Is this some wierd signalling thing, where the appearance that something is really something else is more important than the actuality of it?
It’s a Schelling point. If you can log on as a user you can do a lot of nasty things and we would rather that admins not do those other things.
Does it seem irrational to anyone else here to say
“We don’t know how to prevent this person from using his account to post new downvotes and we don’t know how to reverse the downvotes already posted”
when the actual situation is
“We could stop this account from posting new downvotes with 5 minutes of admin-effort and we could reverse the effects of the mass-downvoting with about an hour of admin-effort without having to write a line of new code, but we won’t.”
I think so, yeah. I don’t know whether it’s reasonable or not but that’s what it is. I might be wrong.
This is somewhat tangential, but neatly links the two recent dramas: I was actually one of the first people subjected to campaigns of mass downvoting, having had hundreds of my comments downvoted in bunches on multiple occasions. Although there are exceptions, from what I’ve seen the well-intentioned extremists who unscrupulously abuse the karma system have generally done so in defense of your well-kept garden.
Good point. That makes more sense.