Interesting. I didn’t know about the x4 limitation. As that puts a natural limit on the downvoting I do not see any problem in principle with the ‘mass’ downvoting. If you do not have the freedom to actually spend your karma on (mass) downvotes, then the problem is not the downvoting but the limit.
The limit ensures that you downvotes need to be compensated by correspondingly valued contributions. If more people exercised their downvoting share this ‘mass downvoting’ wouldn’t even have been noticable.
The problem may be that it is applied to individuals. But even though that can be perceived as unfair it is still strictly the choice available to the voter (not much different that voting on the popularity of people instead of comments which is seldom nowadays instead of in popularity (up)votes.
My proposal would be to either a) reduce the limit to x2 or b) change the limit to x1 ″per person″ (if that is possible easily).
This is conditional on attackers not artificially accumulating karma by upvoting themselves (via multiple accounts). Such self-voting can in principle be either detected or prevented by network flow algorithms like Advogato’s ( http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html ) but that requires significant changes to the karma logic.
Note: I’m not afiliated with Advogato but I’d really like to see the basic principle (the network flow) be applied more to voting algorithms in general.
I tend to think of downvoting as a mechanism to signal and filter low-quality content rather than as a mechanism to ‘spend karma’ on some goal or another. It seems that mass downvoting doesn’t really fit the goal of filtering content—it just lets you know that someone is either trolling LW in general, or just really doesn’t like someone in a way that they aren’t articulating in a PM or response to a comment/article.
Interesting. I didn’t know about the x4 limitation. As that puts a natural limit on the downvoting I do not see any problem in principle with the ‘mass’ downvoting. If you do not have the freedom to actually spend your karma on (mass) downvotes, then the problem is not the downvoting but the limit.
The limit ensures that you downvotes need to be compensated by correspondingly valued contributions. If more people exercised their downvoting share this ‘mass downvoting’ wouldn’t even have been noticable.
The problem may be that it is applied to individuals. But even though that can be perceived as unfair it is still strictly the choice available to the voter (not much different that voting on the popularity of people instead of comments which is seldom nowadays instead of in popularity (up)votes.
My proposal would be to either a) reduce the limit to x2 or b) change the limit to x1 ″per person″ (if that is possible easily).
This is conditional on attackers not artificially accumulating karma by upvoting themselves (via multiple accounts). Such self-voting can in principle be either detected or prevented by network flow algorithms like Advogato’s ( http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html ) but that requires significant changes to the karma logic.
Note: I’m not afiliated with Advogato but I’d really like to see the basic principle (the network flow) be applied more to voting algorithms in general.
I tend to think of downvoting as a mechanism to signal and filter low-quality content rather than as a mechanism to ‘spend karma’ on some goal or another. It seems that mass downvoting doesn’t really fit the goal of filtering content—it just lets you know that someone is either trolling LW in general, or just really doesn’t like someone in a way that they aren’t articulating in a PM or response to a comment/article.