No rule prohibited mass downvoting. Who is to say (retroactively!) that a voter cannot rationally and sincerely determine that the best signal he or she can provide is one that is negative about a particular poster, based on generalizations about the content? E.Y. has advised users that they need not have a rational reason to downvote; not liking something suffices. Well, why not dislike everything by some poster?
This site, moreover, implies that voting is anonymous. Trike arrogated the right to determine voter identity: it invaded the user’s privacy!
The karma system is inherently corrupt and manipulative. That you have to violate posters’ rights to make it work is just further proof.
No rule prohibits burning down the servers that LW runs on. It’s just that certain standards of behaviour are expected, here as anywhere else, and when rules are made, it is in order to clarify things where that is thought necessary.
Mass downvoting by one individual against another has emerged as a questionable phenomenon. Proof of its questionability: it is being questioned. Also, no-one has owned up to doing it, no-one has defended it, and if the motivation were concern for the good of LessWrong, the targets seem oddly chosen for that.
BTW, I was once the target of a bulk downvote. I had around 400 karma at the time and dropped 40. I thought, hahahahahahahahahaha! A dog barked; the caravan moved on. But the current practitioners appear to be operating on a larger scale.
This site, moreover, implies that voting is anonymous. Trike arrogated the right to determine voter identity: it invaded the user’s privacy!
Voting is anonymous, in that your votes are not published to anyone else. That there is a database recording every vote that everyone has ever cast is obvious. How does the site ensure you only get one vote on each comment? How does it show you your own votes? Because it knows.
That such a database, given that it exists, will be examined in sufficiently egregious cases, is also obvious. However, I have not yet seen any instance of personal voting information being made public.
Mass downvoting would be a legitimate, non-anti-social choice if the votes were counted in a proper Bayesian way, in terms of the evidence they provided. The mass-downvoter’s votes would provide no evidence, and so would count for zero.
Rather than look at the rules as logic tests that must be passed for an action to be punished, look at the rules as informing what behavior is allowed and prohibited.
Choosing to dislike every post by a specific user because it is by that user is simply harassment. Choosing to dislike a poster /without providing feedback/ as to why is counter to the principles of good communication.
Distinguish mass downvoting from indiscriminate downvoting. If most comments someone writes are terrible, there shouldn’t be an issue with downvoting those bad comments (except perhaps if you also systematically hunt down all comments, including very old ones, making the average estimate of user’s work severely skewed towards your own judgement). This would be a kind of mass downvoting, but not indiscriminate.
Who is to say (retroactively!) that a voter cannot rationally and sincerely determine that the best signal he or she can provide is one that is negative about a particular poster, based on generalizations about the content?
I agree. It would be great to also have a method of expressing disapproval of particular users (“This user has N friends and M enemies” or something), but indiscriminate downvoting of comments isn’t it, it conflates different signals (quality of specific comments vs. overall impression about a user) and makes them less useful.
No rule prohibited mass downvoting. Who is to say (retroactively!) that a voter cannot rationally and sincerely determine that the best signal he or she can provide is one that is negative about a particular poster, based on generalizations about the content? E.Y. has advised users that they need not have a rational reason to downvote; not liking something suffices. Well, why not dislike everything by some poster?
Well, I believe the ideal is for users to learn what type of comment other users dislike, and adjust their behavior. If you signal that everything they do is bad, then they can only “adjust their behavior” by leaving the site—and if new users are chased off by this, it’s bad for the LessWrong community.
With that said, *I don’t think it’s reasonable to punish this. The user(s) responsible were, presumably, acting in good faith to improve site, as they saw it. It should be punished going forward*, but banning them will only serve to render their actions even more useless. I wont improve their future actions. I doubt it will even act as a useful signal, compared to an announcement that this is now against the rules.
No rule prohibited mass downvoting. Who is to say (retroactively!) that a voter cannot rationally and sincerely determine that the best signal he or she can provide is one that is negative about a particular poster, based on generalizations about the content? E.Y. has advised users that they need not have a rational reason to downvote; not liking something suffices. Well, why not dislike everything by some poster?
This site, moreover, implies that voting is anonymous. Trike arrogated the right to determine voter identity: it invaded the user’s privacy!
The karma system is inherently corrupt and manipulative. That you have to violate posters’ rights to make it work is just further proof.
No rule prohibits burning down the servers that LW runs on. It’s just that certain standards of behaviour are expected, here as anywhere else, and when rules are made, it is in order to clarify things where that is thought necessary.
Mass downvoting by one individual against another has emerged as a questionable phenomenon. Proof of its questionability: it is being questioned. Also, no-one has owned up to doing it, no-one has defended it, and if the motivation were concern for the good of LessWrong, the targets seem oddly chosen for that.
BTW, I was once the target of a bulk downvote. I had around 400 karma at the time and dropped 40. I thought, hahahahahahahahahaha! A dog barked; the caravan moved on. But the current practitioners appear to be operating on a larger scale.
Voting is anonymous, in that your votes are not published to anyone else. That there is a database recording every vote that everyone has ever cast is obvious. How does the site ensure you only get one vote on each comment? How does it show you your own votes? Because it knows.
That such a database, given that it exists, will be examined in sufficiently egregious cases, is also obvious. However, I have not yet seen any instance of personal voting information being made public.
Mass downvoting would be a legitimate, non-anti-social choice if the votes were counted in a proper Bayesian way, in terms of the evidence they provided. The mass-downvoter’s votes would provide no evidence, and so would count for zero.
Rather than look at the rules as logic tests that must be passed for an action to be punished, look at the rules as informing what behavior is allowed and prohibited.
Choosing to dislike every post by a specific user because it is by that user is simply harassment. Choosing to dislike a poster /without providing feedback/ as to why is counter to the principles of good communication.
Distinguish mass downvoting from indiscriminate downvoting. If most comments someone writes are terrible, there shouldn’t be an issue with downvoting those bad comments (except perhaps if you also systematically hunt down all comments, including very old ones, making the average estimate of user’s work severely skewed towards your own judgement). This would be a kind of mass downvoting, but not indiscriminate.
I agree. It would be great to also have a method of expressing disapproval of particular users (“This user has N friends and M enemies” or something), but indiscriminate downvoting of comments isn’t it, it conflates different signals (quality of specific comments vs. overall impression about a user) and makes them less useful.
Can you point to a space on this website where the website makes the promise to keep voting anonymous?
Who do you think gave posters that “right” and where did the grant it?
Given the way US law works they probably couldn’t even grant you that right if they wanted to do so.
Well, I believe the ideal is for users to learn what type of comment other users dislike, and adjust their behavior. If you signal that everything they do is bad, then they can only “adjust their behavior” by leaving the site—and if new users are chased off by this, it’s bad for the LessWrong community.
With that said, *I don’t think it’s reasonable to punish this. The user(s) responsible were, presumably, acting in good faith to improve site, as they saw it. It should be punished going forward*, but banning them will only serve to render their actions even more useless. I wont improve their future actions. I doubt it will even act as a useful signal, compared to an announcement that this is now against the rules.