The original purpose of downvoting was to allow community moderation. Here, “moderation” means two things: (1) Giving higher visibility to high-quality content. This functionality we still have, it’s the upvotes. (2) Removing low-quality content. Comments with karma below −5 and their whole subthreads are collapsed by default. This is especially important when some newcomers start spamming LW with a lot of low-quality comments. It happened more frequently in the past when LW was more popular.
And the “community” aspect means that these decisions about what to show prominently and what to hide are done by the local “hive mind”, i.e. everyone, more precisely anyone above some amount of karma. This is good for several reasons: “wisdom of the crowds”, preventing a few people from getting disproportional power, but most practically because moderators are busy and unable to review everything.
Why was it disabled:
The previous political debates on LW attracted one very persistent and very “mind-killed” person, known as Eugine. This guy made it his personal mission to promote neoreactionary politics on LW, and to harass away everyone who disagrees (because people who disagree with him or with neoreaction are by definition irrational people and don’t belong here). To achieve this, he abused the downvoting system.
The first form of abuse was punishing everyone who disagreed with him by going through their comment history and downvoting all their previous comments. That means, one day you wrote a comment he didn’t like, and the next day you lost hundreds of karma points. And afterwards, any comment you wrote, immediately had one downvote.
This was against how the karma system was supposed to be used (you were supposed to vote on specific comments, not users), and pretty much ruined our important feedback system. Eugine was asked to stop doing this, he didn’t give a fuck. So his account was banned, but he created another one, and then another. So it became a game of whack-a-mole, where Eugine created hundreds of accounts, and moderators tried to find and remove them. Even worse, with multiple accounts Eugine started multiple voting, which means that if he disliked a comment, he downvoted it from dozen accounts, immeditely moving its karma into negative numbers. He typically downvoted all comments that disagreed with neoreactionary politics, or which mentioned Eugine.
LessWrong code is a clone of Reddit; it is not an elegant code, and the database is even less elegant. A few professional web developers tried to implement a few changes; most of them left crying, and the few changes that were successfully implemented took a lot of time. Fighting with Eugine was a huge drain of resources, and one of the main reasons why currently LW is “dead”.
What now:
The short-term solution was to disable downvotes, thus removing from Eugine his ability to censor comments he doesn’t like. Yeah, it has a few negative side-effects.
A long-term solution is to move the whole website to a completely different codebase, which will be easier to maintain. This is a work in progress. Respectful of the planning fallacy I will not give any estimates, except “it will be done when it will be done”. On the new software, downvoting (or some other method of removing low-quality content) will presumably exist.
I am very new here but my impression from reading around is that people were taking advantage of the system by creating multiple accounts and downvoting comments that opposed them in order to appear to be right. I am not sure though.
Why is downvoting disabled, for how long has it been like this, and when will it be back?
The original purpose of downvoting was to allow community moderation. Here, “moderation” means two things: (1) Giving higher visibility to high-quality content. This functionality we still have, it’s the upvotes. (2) Removing low-quality content. Comments with karma below −5 and their whole subthreads are collapsed by default. This is especially important when some newcomers start spamming LW with a lot of low-quality comments. It happened more frequently in the past when LW was more popular.
And the “community” aspect means that these decisions about what to show prominently and what to hide are done by the local “hive mind”, i.e. everyone, more precisely anyone above some amount of karma. This is good for several reasons: “wisdom of the crowds”, preventing a few people from getting disproportional power, but most practically because moderators are busy and unable to review everything.
Why was it disabled:
The previous political debates on LW attracted one very persistent and very “mind-killed” person, known as Eugine. This guy made it his personal mission to promote neoreactionary politics on LW, and to harass away everyone who disagrees (because people who disagree with him or with neoreaction are by definition irrational people and don’t belong here). To achieve this, he abused the downvoting system.
The first form of abuse was punishing everyone who disagreed with him by going through their comment history and downvoting all their previous comments. That means, one day you wrote a comment he didn’t like, and the next day you lost hundreds of karma points. And afterwards, any comment you wrote, immediately had one downvote.
This was against how the karma system was supposed to be used (you were supposed to vote on specific comments, not users), and pretty much ruined our important feedback system. Eugine was asked to stop doing this, he didn’t give a fuck. So his account was banned, but he created another one, and then another. So it became a game of whack-a-mole, where Eugine created hundreds of accounts, and moderators tried to find and remove them. Even worse, with multiple accounts Eugine started multiple voting, which means that if he disliked a comment, he downvoted it from dozen accounts, immeditely moving its karma into negative numbers. He typically downvoted all comments that disagreed with neoreactionary politics, or which mentioned Eugine.
LessWrong code is a clone of Reddit; it is not an elegant code, and the database is even less elegant. A few professional web developers tried to implement a few changes; most of them left crying, and the few changes that were successfully implemented took a lot of time. Fighting with Eugine was a huge drain of resources, and one of the main reasons why currently LW is “dead”.
What now:
The short-term solution was to disable downvotes, thus removing from Eugine his ability to censor comments he doesn’t like. Yeah, it has a few negative side-effects.
A long-term solution is to move the whole website to a completely different codebase, which will be easier to maintain. This is a work in progress. Respectful of the planning fallacy I will not give any estimates, except “it will be done when it will be done”. On the new software, downvoting (or some other method of removing low-quality content) will presumably exist.
Thanks for writing such a comprehensive explanation!
I am very new here but my impression from reading around is that people were taking advantage of the system by creating multiple accounts and downvoting comments that opposed them in order to appear to be right. I am not sure though.
Correct, with the addition that it was only one person. Very persistent, though… keeps doing this for years.