I’ve complained before about the ridiculous over-impact of strong votes on low-total comments. A single voter having a bad reaction can EASILY take one or more comments from positive to negative with zero accountability or repercussions.
And, of course, now that we’re using this measure as a control, that causes undesirable impact—throttling of otherwise-positive members. Also, the recency bias (karma on recent posts used for throttling) can cause very outsized impact on “bursty” posters, who can go a week or three with very few comments, then get into a conversation and have a dozen.
On the flip side, part of the motivation for it was to reduce debate-syle comment cascades. They’re often annoying, and only rarely better than having an explicit dialog(ue) that’s posted at the top level, or just fewer and more complete comments and postings. I have to admit that repeated accusations (and indignant responses to) of missing the point or not reading the material don’t add much value to me, and I’m happy to have less of it on LW.
In order for a rate limit to trigger the user needs to be downvoted by at least 4 different users for users below 2000 karma, and 7 different users for users above 2000 karma (relevant line of code is here).
This failsafe I think prevents most occasional commenters and posters from being affected by one or two people downvoting them.
I do think it fails to trigger for Roko here, since I think we only check for “total downvoter count”, which helps with new users, but of course over the hundreds of comments that Roko has acquired over the years he has acquired more than 7 downvoters. I think replacing that failsafe with “downvoters in the last month” is a marginal improvement, and I might make a PR with that.
Oh, I am an idiot, you are right. I got mislead by the variable name.
Then yeah, this seems pretty good to me (and seems like it should prevent basically all instances of one or two people having a grudge against someone causing them to be rate-limited).
Update: −2 disagree on this. Extremely frustrating to receive anonymous general feedback.
Trying my best here but I get downvotes a lot and often it feels like it’s based on the opinion expressed in a comment. I seem to get upvoted a lot when I put pictures of evidence in the comment with simple empirical cites.
Downvoters never reply. I suspect because they are obviously afraid I will retaliate their downvotes with my own...
Your moderators have also disciplined me several times, giving general tips that sometimes I can’t find a single message that satisfies their claim. Guess I can’t see my own mistakes. It would be really help to have a policy of citing or making some kind of list of the comments that are unsatisfactory and providing it to the user. You also could provide this list before punishing...
If that’s too labor intensive, you could expand the reaction system to send a separate notification to the user each time a mod reacts to a users content.
Actually ok now that I am thinking, why don’t downvoters have to select the text and provide the negative feedback in order to issue a downvote? Contributing to a temporary ban without feedback is cruel...
Actually ok now that I am thinking, why don’t downvoters have to select the text and provide the negative feedback in order to issue a downvote?
Forcing people to write a whole sentence or multiple paragraphs to signal that they think some content is bad would of course have enormous chilling effects on people’s ability to express their preferences over content on the site, and reduce the signal we have on content-quality a lot.
Downvoters never reply. I suspect because they are obviously afraid I will retaliate their downvotes with my own...
I would be quite surprised if it’s about vote-retaliation. I think it’s usually because then people ask follow-up questions and there is usually an asymmetric burden of proof in public communication where interlocutors demand very high levels of precision and shareable evidence, when the actual underlying cognitive process was “my gut says this is bad, and I don’t want to see more of this”.
I would think that everyone with 2000 karma has been downvoted by at least 7 users. That’s a lot of posts and comments.
It seems like maybe this algorithm deserves a little rethinking. Maybe the past month is all you need to change, but I don’t know what the rest of the algorithm is. −5 is a very low bar for limiting a high net karma user, since that can be produced by one angry big downvotes from another high karma user.
It’s net karma of your last 20 comments or posts. So in order for one person to rate limit you, you would have needed to write 20 comments in a row that got basically no votes from anyone but you, at which point, I probably endorse rate-limiting you (though the zero vote case is a bit tricky, and indeed where I think a lot of the false-positives and false-negatives of the system come from).
I do think the system tends to fire the most false-positives when people are engaging in really in-depth comment trees and so write a lot of comments that get no engagement, which then makes things more sensitive to marginal downvotes. I do think “number of downvoters in the last month” or maybe “number of downvoters on your last 20 comments or posts” would help a bunch with that.
I would love to see it switch from being based on votes on your most recent n comments to being votes in a time window. If someone has posted one comment a month for 20 months and none of them got votes except for one strong downvote six months ago, that doesn’t seem like it should get rate limited.
Yeah, it’s not crazy, but I currently am against it. I think if a user only comments occasionally, but always comments in a way that gets downvoted, then I think it’s good for them to maintain a low rate-limit. I don’t see how calendar time passing gives me evidence that someone’s comments will be better and that I now want more of them on the site again.
That’s a nice to have, and I do think it reduces the correlation across time and so is a case for having the rate-limit decay with just time, but mostly the point of the rate-limit is to increase the average comment quality on the site without banning a bunch of people (which comes with much more chilling effects where their perspectives are not at all represented on the site, and while still allowing them to complain about the moderation and make the costs to them known)
...okay, but there have in fact been quite a number of people who make high quality comments normally, who have complained and made the costs to them known, expressed that time based decay would have been better… and you haven’t changed it.
in particular, someone who’s name escapes me right now who was new to the site and wrote carefully reasoned comments every time, but who was saying things highly critical of most things she commented on—and who was quite careful to not use emotive language—was getting downvoted consistently, got rate limited, and nearly immediately left the site.
We definitely need to separate “some types of comments get incorrectly downvoted” from “throttling is harmful in some cases”. It drives me nuts that some kinds of criticism get downvoted, even when they’re well-made and relevant. But I don’t see any solution that doesn’t have very large reduction in the overall information content of voting.
There’s no software solution but when you actually see such criticism you can vote it up strongly.
If we have enough experienced people in this community who have the karma to cast strong votes and willingness to do it, the problem is solvable.
Not sure who you are referring to, but we made some tweaks to various parts of the system of the last few months, so decent chance it wouldn’t happen again.
I currently am reasonably happy when I review who gets rate limited when, though it’s definitely not easy to see the full effects of it. I think a time decay would make it a lot worse.
This is placing a high bar on the tone of comments. But the culture of collegiality is valuable in a subtle and powerful way, so I’d probably endorse it.
I would like to see what Roko has to say about my post, so now I’m very curious how this works. Is this saying that you get rate-limited if you have at least 7 people downvoting you in the past 20 comments, regardless of how many people upvote you or how many times those 7 people vote? Also, does this count both overall and agreement karma?
No, it’s if at least 7 people downvote you in the past 20 comments (on comments that end up net-negative), and the net of all the votes (ignoring your self-votes) on your last 20 comments is below −5 (just using approval-karma, not agreement-karma).
I’ve complained before about the ridiculous over-impact of strong votes on low-total comments. A single voter having a bad reaction can EASILY take one or more comments from positive to negative with zero accountability or repercussions.
And, of course, now that we’re using this measure as a control, that causes undesirable impact—throttling of otherwise-positive members. Also, the recency bias (karma on recent posts used for throttling) can cause very outsized impact on “bursty” posters, who can go a week or three with very few comments, then get into a conversation and have a dozen.
On the flip side, part of the motivation for it was to reduce debate-syle comment cascades. They’re often annoying, and only rarely better than having an explicit dialog(ue) that’s posted at the top level, or just fewer and more complete comments and postings. I have to admit that repeated accusations (and indignant responses to) of missing the point or not reading the material don’t add much value to me, and I’m happy to have less of it on LW.
In order for a rate limit to trigger the user needs to be downvoted by at least 4 different users for users below 2000 karma, and 7 different users for users above 2000 karma (relevant line of code is here).
This failsafe I think prevents most occasional commenters and posters from being affected by one or two people downvoting them.
I do think it fails to trigger for Roko here, since I think we only check for “total downvoter count”, which helps with new users, but of course over the hundreds of comments that Roko has acquired over the years he has acquired more than 7 downvoters. I think replacing that failsafe with “downvoters in the last month” is a marginal improvement, and I might make a PR with that.(We check for “downvoter count within window”, not all-time.)
Oh, I am an idiot, you are right. I got mislead by the variable name.
Then yeah, this seems pretty good to me (and seems like it should prevent basically all instances of one or two people having a grudge against someone causing them to be rate-limited).
Update: −2 disagree on this. Extremely frustrating to receive anonymous general feedback.
Trying my best here but I get downvotes a lot and often it feels like it’s based on the opinion expressed in a comment. I seem to get upvoted a lot when I put pictures of evidence in the comment with simple empirical cites.
Downvoters never reply. I suspect because they are obviously afraid I will retaliate their downvotes with my own...
Your moderators have also disciplined me several times, giving general tips that sometimes I can’t find a single message that satisfies their claim. Guess I can’t see my own mistakes. It would be really help to have a policy of citing or making some kind of list of the comments that are unsatisfactory and providing it to the user. You also could provide this list before punishing...
If that’s too labor intensive, you could expand the reaction system to send a separate notification to the user each time a mod reacts to a users content.
Actually ok now that I am thinking, why don’t downvoters have to select the text and provide the negative feedback in order to issue a downvote? Contributing to a temporary ban without feedback is cruel...
Forcing people to write a whole sentence or multiple paragraphs to signal that they think some content is bad would of course have enormous chilling effects on people’s ability to express their preferences over content on the site, and reduce the signal we have on content-quality a lot.
I would be quite surprised if it’s about vote-retaliation. I think it’s usually because then people ask follow-up questions and there is usually an asymmetric burden of proof in public communication where interlocutors demand very high levels of precision and shareable evidence, when the actual underlying cognitive process was “my gut says this is bad, and I don’t want to see more of this”.
I would think that everyone with 2000 karma has been downvoted by at least 7 users. That’s a lot of posts and comments.
It seems like maybe this algorithm deserves a little rethinking. Maybe the past month is all you need to change, but I don’t know what the rest of the algorithm is. −5 is a very low bar for limiting a high net karma user, since that can be produced by one angry big downvotes from another high karma user.
It’s net karma of your last 20 comments or posts. So in order for one person to rate limit you, you would have needed to write 20 comments in a row that got basically no votes from anyone but you, at which point, I probably endorse rate-limiting you (though the zero vote case is a bit tricky, and indeed where I think a lot of the false-positives and false-negatives of the system come from).
I do think the system tends to fire the most false-positives when people are engaging in really in-depth comment trees and so write a lot of comments that get no engagement, which then makes things more sensitive to marginal downvotes. I do think “number of downvoters in the last month” or maybe “number of downvoters on your last 20 comments or posts” would help a bunch with that.
I would love to see it switch from being based on votes on your most recent n comments to being votes in a time window. If someone has posted one comment a month for 20 months and none of them got votes except for one strong downvote six months ago, that doesn’t seem like it should get rate limited.
Yeah, it’s not crazy, but I currently am against it. I think if a user only comments occasionally, but always comments in a way that gets downvoted, then I think it’s good for them to maintain a low rate-limit. I don’t see how calendar time passing gives me evidence that someone’s comments will be better and that I now want more of them on the site again.
the purpose of the system is to give people a breather if they get upset, yeah? that emotional activation fades with time.
That’s a nice to have, and I do think it reduces the correlation across time and so is a case for having the rate-limit decay with just time, but mostly the point of the rate-limit is to increase the average comment quality on the site without banning a bunch of people (which comes with much more chilling effects where their perspectives are not at all represented on the site, and while still allowing them to complain about the moderation and make the costs to them known)
...okay, but there have in fact been quite a number of people who make high quality comments normally, who have complained and made the costs to them known, expressed that time based decay would have been better… and you haven’t changed it.
in particular, someone who’s name escapes me right now who was new to the site and wrote carefully reasoned comments every time, but who was saying things highly critical of most things she commented on—and who was quite careful to not use emotive language—was getting downvoted consistently, got rate limited, and nearly immediately left the site.
We definitely need to separate “some types of comments get incorrectly downvoted” from “throttling is harmful in some cases”. It drives me nuts that some kinds of criticism get downvoted, even when they’re well-made and relevant. But I don’t see any solution that doesn’t have very large reduction in the overall information content of voting.
There’s no software solution but when you actually see such criticism you can vote it up strongly. If we have enough experienced people in this community who have the karma to cast strong votes and willingness to do it, the problem is solvable.
Not sure who you are referring to, but we made some tweaks to various parts of the system of the last few months, so decent chance it wouldn’t happen again.
I currently am reasonably happy when I review who gets rate limited when, though it’s definitely not easy to see the full effects of it. I think a time decay would make it a lot worse.
That makes more sense, thanks.
This is placing a high bar on the tone of comments. But the culture of collegiality is valuable in a subtle and powerful way, so I’d probably endorse it.
I would like to see what Roko has to say about my post, so now I’m very curious how this works. Is this saying that you get rate-limited if you have at least 7 people downvoting you in the past 20 comments, regardless of how many people upvote you or how many times those 7 people vote? Also, does this count both overall and agreement karma?
No, it’s if at least 7 people downvote you in the past 20 comments (on comments that end up net-negative), and the net of all the votes (ignoring your self-votes) on your last 20 comments is below −5 (just using approval-karma, not agreement-karma).
… and a net negative (in the last 20 comments). See details: link
And notably, the 7 people have to have downvoted you on a comment that got below 0.