Hi Raemon. I have noticed I now seem to have unrestricted comment privileges. I assume it’s a combination of “recency” and “last n” that have made my account no longer satisfy rate limiting rules.
I assume the algorithm you are using is stateless, so even a user who gets the most severe restriction could theoretically just wait or give good comments at the restricted rate long enough to be unrestricted.
I think, if you implemented it this way, this is pretty good. Other message boards have this concept of “strikes” or “warnings” or “users the mods don’t like”. This algorithm is stateful, meaning for very old boards (10-20 years+) a substantial fraction of all users are eventually banned because if a user makes 10k posts, and any post contains content is that receives a warning, eventually they will have enough warnings to receive a ban.
(Similarly if humans lived forever, eventually all would become convicted felons with the current justice system because it takes only 1 bad moment or an error that convicts an innocent to gain that state, and it can never be erased)
I think you’ve interpreted it right, yeah. (I’d clarify: recent karma is “karma of your last 20 posts/and/or/comments, sorted by recency”, so “waiting” won’t cause that to fade. But it caps out at 1-comment-per-3 days, so you can fix it by writing good comments in a reasonable amount of time)
Re: “strikes”
A thing that I might consider implementing (but haven’t currently), is some sort of memory wherein if you get rate limited once, in the future the system will rate limit you faster or more strictly if you started getting downvoted heavily again (but, not in a way that would escalate to a ban).
One problem with your stated algorithm is what happened in my case. I had conversations via pm and mentioned to a few posters here my situation. More than once someone went on an upvote spree, adding points to posts going back years and reducing the level of downvotes on some of the controversial comments I made.
Your algorithm applies a “strike” to what can be a temporary spike. With your stateless implementation, a user could become throttled, the other users could disagree and the user could become unthrottled. The existence of “strong” + - votes makes this possible as an adversarial attack.
You could recalculate the strikes, in effect “pardoning” a user, but I wouldn’t want to maintain the code that does that.
I had conversations via pm and mentioned to a few posters here my situation. More than once someone went on an upvote spree, adding points to posts going back years and reducing the level of downvotes on some of the controversial comments I made.
I do want to flag – I think this may basically be voter fraud (and the sort of thing that we might ban people for)
It’s fine/normal to see some recent comments that you think were unfairly downvoted and go upvote them. It’s kinda borderline-fine to say “hey, I think some of my recent comments were downvoted and I think you’ll think those comments were good/fine, could you take a look and upvote them if you think they’re good?”. But, having someone systematically go upvote lots of past stuff is over the line of voter fraud.
Hi Raemon. I have noticed I now seem to have unrestricted comment privileges. I assume it’s a combination of “recency” and “last n” that have made my account no longer satisfy rate limiting rules.
I assume the algorithm you are using is stateless, so even a user who gets the most severe restriction could theoretically just wait or give good comments at the restricted rate long enough to be unrestricted.
I think, if you implemented it this way, this is pretty good. Other message boards have this concept of “strikes” or “warnings” or “users the mods don’t like”. This algorithm is stateful, meaning for very old boards (10-20 years+) a substantial fraction of all users are eventually banned because if a user makes 10k posts, and any post contains content is that receives a warning, eventually they will have enough warnings to receive a ban.
(Similarly if humans lived forever, eventually all would become convicted felons with the current justice system because it takes only 1 bad moment or an error that convicts an innocent to gain that state, and it can never be erased)
I think you’ve interpreted it right, yeah. (I’d clarify: recent karma is “karma of your last 20 posts/and/or/comments, sorted by recency”, so “waiting” won’t cause that to fade. But it caps out at 1-comment-per-3 days, so you can fix it by writing good comments in a reasonable amount of time)
Re: “strikes”
A thing that I might consider implementing (but haven’t currently), is some sort of memory wherein if you get rate limited once, in the future the system will rate limit you faster or more strictly if you started getting downvoted heavily again (but, not in a way that would escalate to a ban).
One problem with your stated algorithm is what happened in my case. I had conversations via pm and mentioned to a few posters here my situation. More than once someone went on an upvote spree, adding points to posts going back years and reducing the level of downvotes on some of the controversial comments I made.
Your algorithm applies a “strike” to what can be a temporary spike. With your stateless implementation, a user could become throttled, the other users could disagree and the user could become unthrottled. The existence of “strong” + - votes makes this possible as an adversarial attack.
You could recalculate the strikes, in effect “pardoning” a user, but I wouldn’t want to maintain the code that does that.
I do want to flag – I think this may basically be voter fraud (and the sort of thing that we might ban people for)
It’s fine/normal to see some recent comments that you think were unfairly downvoted and go upvote them. It’s kinda borderline-fine to say “hey, I think some of my recent comments were downvoted and I think you’ll think those comments were good/fine, could you take a look and upvote them if you think they’re good?”. But, having someone systematically go upvote lots of past stuff is over the line of voter fraud.