What have you/they been trying to do? Unsupervised detection of mass-downvoting, or exploration of particular specific cases alleged to have occurred? If the latter, do the records not show the downvotes at all, or do they show downvotes from many different individuals in each case?
(Does the database contain information about when any given downvote happened? I guess probably not, which makes diagnosis more difficult.)
For example: I’ve been having ~5-10 recent and older comments downvoted per day, I think all during UK night-time or early morning (i.e., roughly 4pm to 2am Pacific), most days (I think all) for about the last 4 or 5. Approximately all of the recent-ish comments I’ve checked appear to have been downvoted exactly once. (A few very recent ones haven’t been. A couple have been downvoted more than once; I guess that they were genuinely disliked on their (de)merits.)
If someone has the time to look, it would be interesting to know: Do the records show that those comments have been downvoted, and by whom? One downvoter, or a few, or many? Any signs of sockpuppetry, if many?
One possibility (though an unappealing one, not a very likely one a priori, and one that I feel a bit paranoid even mentioning) is a sort of downvoting ring of people willing to cooperate on downvoting at a rate just slow enough to avoid suspicion. That would be bad. And also sad.
[EDITED to add: I’d offer to help with the investigating, but as an interested party I probably shouldn’t.]
[EDITED again to add: at 2014-02-15 08:41 GMT, it looks as if I haven’t had a pile of downvotes in the last 8-10 hours. Maybe whoever it is has got bored, or maybe they’ve noticed evidence of someone looking. Or, of course, maybe I’m making the whole thing up, but anyone who finds that likely and cares to check can look at my comment history and see the evidence.]
My last 100 comments contain exactly one comment that is not downvoted.
I counted falenas108′s and he has at least 50 comments in a row without one comment that is not downvoted.
Starting with his first downvoted comment before the date of the above post, gwm has a string of 38 comments that are all downvoted, yet of his past 5 most recent comments (after he says the downvoter gave up) there are no downvotes.
It’s obvious that we’re all the victim of mass downvoting, and whatever Eliezer did didn’t work. The system has to at least keep track of who downvoted which post, and it shouldn’t be too hard for anyone with database access to get a count.
I suggest a simple change: for any logged-in user’s own comments, display the name(s) of the people who downvoted him. I suspect that would fix the problem.
I suggest a simple change: for any logged-in user’s own comments, display the name(s) of the people who downvoted him. I suspect that would fix the problem.
This would prevent mass downvoting, but at the cost of making votes socially significant. That’s a bigger deal than it sounds like; it means that you can schmooze people by downvoting their enemies’ comments (or by upvoting their own, if you extend it to that), and that you can incur the wrath of influential users if you dare to downvote theirs.
If you think there’s too much politics in voting patterns here already, I guarantee this will make it ten times worse. About the best thing that could happen is people converging on a Facebook-style upvote-only pattern (maybe with exceptions for obvious trolls), and I still view that as distinctly inferior to Reddit’s format for the purpose of promoting quality discussion.
How about the alternative of showing the name if greater than X percent of the user’s last Y comments have been voted down by the same person? If you downvote 98 of a user’s last 100 comments and they’re not a blatant troll, you probably deserve to earn their wrath, influential or not.
If you don’t want to do even that, then how about this instead: for each comment that was modded down, have a button to click for “moderation statistics”. If you click on the button it will say something like “This comment was modded down by 2 users. User 1 has modded down 4 of your past 100 posts. User 2 has modded down 99 of your past 100 posts”. Suspicious numbers like 99 out of 100 can be grounds for contacting an admin. There’s nothing like having an actual human being doing actual adminning. This solution would also prevent someone from gaming the system by noticing that a name is displayed at 95% so he only mods down 94% of someone’s posts.
At that point you might as well just write moderation tools for it, without requiring the user input step. Which wouldn’t be a bad idea in theory, but it runs into the usual LW bottleneck of development time.
All that’s actually needed in my case is an active admin that I can tell “this is an extremely suspicious pattern; please check it out”. Having a button to display moderation statistics is just a way to make it harder for the admin to rationalize away not doing any adminning (or looking at it from the other side, for the user to be able to prove to the admin that the problem is worth taking the time to look into).
I suggest a simple change: for any logged-in user’s own comments, display the name(s) of the people who downvoted him. I suspect that would fix the problem.
How?
Let us say you suddenly discover that a user called (say) EvilDownvoter had been downvoting all your posts. How exactly does that help stop him?
If they’re also posting comments, revealing what they are doing would discredit them as a legitimate commentator, especially if history shows that they have an argument with me that they are trying to settle by forcing me off the site.
If they’re not posting comments, that means they have a single purpose account, which is an obvious troll.
It would be possible to complain about them to an admin by name rather than complaining based on a statistical analysis of one’s posts. It would be much harder for an admin to justify inaction, and much more likely for him to lose status given inaction, than if no name could be provided.
Availability bias and related biases would make it easier to gain sympathy from others if the situation is easier to understand (no need to complain about Poisson distributions) and more specific (has a name attached).
Many thanks for looking into this!
What have you/they been trying to do? Unsupervised detection of mass-downvoting, or exploration of particular specific cases alleged to have occurred? If the latter, do the records not show the downvotes at all, or do they show downvotes from many different individuals in each case?
(Does the database contain information about when any given downvote happened? I guess probably not, which makes diagnosis more difficult.)
For example: I’ve been having ~5-10 recent and older comments downvoted per day, I think all during UK night-time or early morning (i.e., roughly 4pm to 2am Pacific), most days (I think all) for about the last 4 or 5. Approximately all of the recent-ish comments I’ve checked appear to have been downvoted exactly once. (A few very recent ones haven’t been. A couple have been downvoted more than once; I guess that they were genuinely disliked on their (de)merits.)
If someone has the time to look, it would be interesting to know: Do the records show that those comments have been downvoted, and by whom? One downvoter, or a few, or many? Any signs of sockpuppetry, if many?
One possibility (though an unappealing one, not a very likely one a priori, and one that I feel a bit paranoid even mentioning) is a sort of downvoting ring of people willing to cooperate on downvoting at a rate just slow enough to avoid suspicion. That would be bad. And also sad.
[EDITED to add: I’d offer to help with the investigating, but as an interested party I probably shouldn’t.]
[EDITED again to add: at 2014-02-15 08:41 GMT, it looks as if I haven’t had a pile of downvotes in the last 8-10 hours. Maybe whoever it is has got bored, or maybe they’ve noticed evidence of someone looking. Or, of course, maybe I’m making the whole thing up, but anyone who finds that likely and cares to check can look at my comment history and see the evidence.]
This is exactly the pattern for my downvoting too.
My last 100 comments contain exactly one comment that is not downvoted. I counted falenas108′s and he has at least 50 comments in a row without one comment that is not downvoted. Starting with his first downvoted comment before the date of the above post, gwm has a string of 38 comments that are all downvoted, yet of his past 5 most recent comments (after he says the downvoter gave up) there are no downvotes.
It’s obvious that we’re all the victim of mass downvoting, and whatever Eliezer did didn’t work. The system has to at least keep track of who downvoted which post, and it shouldn’t be too hard for anyone with database access to get a count.
I suggest a simple change: for any logged-in user’s own comments, display the name(s) of the people who downvoted him. I suspect that would fix the problem.
This would prevent mass downvoting, but at the cost of making votes socially significant. That’s a bigger deal than it sounds like; it means that you can schmooze people by downvoting their enemies’ comments (or by upvoting their own, if you extend it to that), and that you can incur the wrath of influential users if you dare to downvote theirs.
If you think there’s too much politics in voting patterns here already, I guarantee this will make it ten times worse. About the best thing that could happen is people converging on a Facebook-style upvote-only pattern (maybe with exceptions for obvious trolls), and I still view that as distinctly inferior to Reddit’s format for the purpose of promoting quality discussion.
How about the alternative of showing the name if greater than X percent of the user’s last Y comments have been voted down by the same person? If you downvote 98 of a user’s last 100 comments and they’re not a blatant troll, you probably deserve to earn their wrath, influential or not.
If you don’t want to do even that, then how about this instead: for each comment that was modded down, have a button to click for “moderation statistics”. If you click on the button it will say something like “This comment was modded down by 2 users. User 1 has modded down 4 of your past 100 posts. User 2 has modded down 99 of your past 100 posts”. Suspicious numbers like 99 out of 100 can be grounds for contacting an admin. There’s nothing like having an actual human being doing actual adminning. This solution would also prevent someone from gaming the system by noticing that a name is displayed at 95% so he only mods down 94% of someone’s posts.
At that point you might as well just write moderation tools for it, without requiring the user input step. Which wouldn’t be a bad idea in theory, but it runs into the usual LW bottleneck of development time.
All that’s actually needed in my case is an active admin that I can tell “this is an extremely suspicious pattern; please check it out”. Having a button to display moderation statistics is just a way to make it harder for the admin to rationalize away not doing any adminning (or looking at it from the other side, for the user to be able to prove to the admin that the problem is worth taking the time to look into).
How?
Let us say you suddenly discover that a user called (say) EvilDownvoter had been downvoting all your posts. How exactly does that help stop him?
If they’re also posting comments, revealing what they are doing would discredit them as a legitimate commentator, especially if history shows that they have an argument with me that they are trying to settle by forcing me off the site.
If they’re not posting comments, that means they have a single purpose account, which is an obvious troll.
It would be possible to complain about them to an admin by name rather than complaining based on a statistical analysis of one’s posts. It would be much harder for an admin to justify inaction, and much more likely for him to lose status given inaction, than if no name could be provided.
Availability bias and related biases would make it easier to gain sympathy from others if the situation is easier to understand (no need to complain about Poisson distributions) and more specific (has a name attached).