the guy who did it had sockpuppets, and it was more like my last 15-20 posts had each lost 5-10 karma.
I think you can’t give more downvotes than your karma, so that person would need 5-10 sockpuppets with at least 15-20 (EDIT: actually 4-5) karma each. If someone is going to the trouble of doing that, it seems unlikely that they would just pick on you and nobody else (given that your writings don’t seem to be particularly extreme in some way). Has anyone else experience something similar?
Just find a Wikipedia article on a cognitive bias that we haven’t had a top-level post on yet. Then, make a post to main with the content of the Wikipedia article (restated) and references to the relevant literature (you probably can safely make up half of the references). It will probably get in the neighborhood of 50 upvotes, giving you 500 karma, which allows 2000 comment downvotes.
Even if those estimates are really high, that’s still a lot of power for little effort. And just repeat the process for 20 biases, and you’ve got 20 sockpuppets who can push a combined 20 downvotes on a large number of comments.
Of course, in the bargain Less Wrong is getting genuinely high-quality articles. Not necessarily a bug.
If restating Wikipedia is enough to make for a genuinely high-quality article, maybe we should have a bot that copy-pastes a relevant Wikipedia article into a top-level post every few days. (Based on a few minutes of research, it looks like this is legal if you link to the original article each time, but tell me if I’m wrong.)
If restating Wikipedia is enough to make for a genuinely high-quality article, maybe we should have a bot that copy-pastes a relevant Wikipedia article into a top-level post every few days.
Really, I think the main problem with this is that most of the work is identifying which ones are the ‘relevant’ articles.
Yes; I didn’t mean to say you were implying a copy-paste solution. But if we’re speaking in the context of causing good articles to be posted and not in the context of thinking up hypothetical sock-puppeting strategies, whether it’s copy-pasted or restated shouldn’t matter unless the restatement is better-written than the original.
But then those comments / posts will be correctively downvoted, unless they’re high-quality. And you get a bunch more karma from a few posts than a few comments, so do both!
We found one of the sockpuppets, and he had one comment that added nothing that was at like 13 karma. It wasn’t downvoted until I was karmassassinated.
I think you can’t give more downvotes than your karma, so that person would need 5-10 sockpuppets with at least 15-20 (EDIT: actually 4-5) karma each. If someone is going to the trouble of doing that, it seems unlikely that they would just pick on you and nobody else (given that your writings don’t seem to be particularly extreme in some way). Has anyone else experience something similar?
Creating sockpuppets for downvoting is easy.
(kids, don’t try this at home).
Just find a Wikipedia article on a cognitive bias that we haven’t had a top-level post on yet. Then, make a post to main with the content of the Wikipedia article (restated) and references to the relevant literature (you probably can safely make up half of the references). It will probably get in the neighborhood of 50 upvotes, giving you 500 karma, which allows 2000 comment downvotes.
Even if those estimates are really high, that’s still a lot of power for little effort. And just repeat the process for 20 biases, and you’ve got 20 sockpuppets who can push a combined 20 downvotes on a large number of comments.
Of course, in the bargain Less Wrong is getting genuinely high-quality articles. Not necessarily a bug.
If restating Wikipedia is enough to make for a genuinely high-quality article, maybe we should have a bot that copy-pastes a relevant Wikipedia article into a top-level post every few days. (Based on a few minutes of research, it looks like this is legal if you link to the original article each time, but tell me if I’m wrong.)
Really, I think the main problem with this is that most of the work is identifying which ones are the ‘relevant’ articles.
I was implying a non-copy-paste solution. Still, interesting idea.
Yes; I didn’t mean to say you were implying a copy-paste solution. But if we’re speaking in the context of causing good articles to be posted and not in the context of thinking up hypothetical sock-puppeting strategies, whether it’s copy-pasted or restated shouldn’t matter unless the restatement is better-written than the original.
agreed
Modulo the fake references, of course.
of course
There’s not much reason to do something like this, when you can arbitrarily upvote your own comments with your sockpuppets and give yourself karma.
But then those comments / posts will be correctively downvoted, unless they’re high-quality. And you get a bunch more karma from a few posts than a few comments, so do both!
You can delete them afterwards, you keep karma from deleted posts.
Let’s keep giving the disgruntled script kiddies instructions! That’s bound to produce eudaimonia for all!
We found one of the sockpuppets, and he had one comment that added nothing that was at like 13 karma. It wasn’t downvoted until I was karmassassinated.
It’s some multiple of your karma, isn’t it? At least four, I think- thomblake would know.
Yes, 4x, last I checked.