Has Eugine’s mass-downvoting got more aggressive for everyone lately, or just for me? I am getting hit for 10 points or so per day; not only old comments but (I think) every comment I post, without exception.
[EDITED to add:] Of course by “everyone” I mean all Eugine’s targets. Actually I don’t know who else he’s gunning for at the moment; perhaps it’s just me.
Perhaps some of those downvotes are from other people and/or reflect actual deficiencies in what I post. But I bet the great majority are just Eugine being Eugine.
[EDITED to add:] Actually, this is interesting. At least some of my comments that are net-positive have lots of downvotes, in some cases more than seems plausible “organically”. E.g., this one appears to be on +7-5; I’m not sure it really deserves +7, but I’m extremely sure it doesn’t deserve −5. This one appears to be +6-5; a natural −5 seems more plausible here but still unlikely. This one is on +3-4. Some more, all mysteriously on just enough downvotes to come out negative: +1-2, +3-4, +2-3, +2-3, +2-3, +3-4, +2-3, +4-5, +3-4, +2-3, +3-4, +3-4. That’s twelve consecutive comments from my overview page, all of which just happen to be on exactly −1 despite substantial numbers of votes overall.
I expect some of those downvotes are honest downvotes. But I reckon (p=0.9) Eugine has a new strategy (well done, Eugine! Such creativity!): instead of downvoting everything once, downvote everything to −1 unless you run out of sockpuppets. (And we have weak evidence that Eugine has exactly 5 downvoting sockpuppets right now.)
[EDITED again to add:] Actually, it’s more like 30 points per day right now. I wonder what fraction of all upvotes and downvotes on LW in the last week have been Eugine.
[EDITED again to add:] About 45 points in the last 8 hours; my 30-day karma is now on −39 which is something like +305-344. “Normally” I think something like 5-10% of votes on my comments are downvotes, so I guess maybe 330 or so of those downvotes are Eugine’s. (Current estimated time to zero karma, assuming no relevant moderator action: maybe 8 months.)
I haven’t myself noticed a lot of new accounts other than ones I’ve already reported as likely-Eugines, and one other that I’m keeping an eye on—you might want to ask OrphanWilde, who is the one who reported seeing a lot of new accounts.
When I do notice new accounts it’s simply by seeing things in the “Recent Comments” written by users whose names I don’t recognize.
(If mods don’t have a tool for listing recently created accounts, that should go on whatever monstrous wishlist we have for LW features...)
I watch the new comments list, primarily, and check usernames I don’t recognize for posting histories.
Over the past week a larger-than-normal number of new accounts have appeared; none of them have exhibited Eugine’s usual behaviors, so thus far I’m just observing. If they have a tendency to write until they reach 10 karma and then stop, well, they’re probably silent puppets.
To my eye, there are… an unusual number of new accounts jumping immediately into posting, lately. None of them have Eugine’s trademark style or focus on his preferred topics, however.
I would be unsurprised to find that some of them are Eugine.
There’s an obvious solution, which I propose in a spirit of impartial generosity: Insta-ban any account that downvotes any of my comments :-).
(Horrifically, that might actually be an improvement on the present state of affairs. I hope it’s unnecessary to say that it would still be an absolutely terrible idea, but I’ll say it anyway just in case.)
I am keeping an eye on the individuals, at any rate. It will be interesting if he’s adopting a new tactic of -not- talking about the same tired talking points. It would suggest a level of cleverness he thus far has not demonstrated.
And once we get the tools in place to start tracking downvote patterns, that game will be up, too.
My question is: why the heck are you such a dangerous person to Eugene? What point of view do you hold that Eugene deems so worthy of mass downvoting? Ironically for him, now I want to know.
At this point I think it’s mostly a personal vendetta on his part. But back when he wasn’t just downvoting practically everything I ever post, his mass-downvoting was usually triggered by my having the temerity to disagree with him about one of his three hot-button issues: (1) whether black people are stupid, lazy and dangerous, (2) whether women are mentally unsuited for science, engineering, etc., and (3) whether transgender people should be called “trannies”, addressed by their “old” pronouns, etc.
(Eugine would not necessarily express his positions in the way I have suggested there. But e.g. when presented with a list of highly successful black people—after he suggested there are no successful black people for a “black pride” event to celebrate—he described them as “basically dancing bears”. Make of that what you will.)
You forgot something: Eugine holds that anyone who disagrees with these views is insufficiently rational and doesn’t belong on Less Wrong.
He decided at one point that there were too many such irrational people, and engaged in a mass-downvote campaign to punish his ideological enemies; he was banned for this, and keeps coming back, like a sad dumb little puppy who can’t understand why he gets punished for shitting on the carpet.
I’m curious; did you choose that analogy on purpose?
Anyway: yes, I agree, I think Eugine thinks that lack of enthusiasm for bigotry ⇒ denial of biological realities ⇒ stupid irrationality ⇒ doesn’t belong on LW, and that’s part of what’s going on here. But I am pretty sure that Eugine or anyone else would search in vain[1] for anything I’ve said on LW that denies biological realities, and that being wrong about one controversial topic doesn’t by any means imply stupid irrationality—and I think it’s at least partly the personal-vendetta thing, and partly a severe case of political mindkilling, that stops him noticing those things.
[1] And not only because searching for anything on LW is a pain in the (ahahahaha) posterior.
I’m curious; did you choose that analogy on purpose?
Not in that regard, no. I’m actually vaguely in favor of the Sad Puppies, as I think that Larry Correia has some significant points, although I think, as with Correia, that the point was already made, and at this point I regard it as largely a political exercise.
Which is to say, I agree with the original purpose of demonstrating that there is a bias at play (given the staunch denials that such a bias existed), but have little interest in their efforts at fighting the bias. I don’t care about the award, I don’t care who it goes to; it was never a selling point to me, and never will be.
The Rabid Puppies… I find boring and childish. They hopped on the bandwagon entirely to piss off people they enjoy pissing off.
“You have refused death,” said Dumbledore, “and if I destroyed your body, your spirit would only wander back, like a dumb animal that cannot understand it is being sent away.”
Remark: a policy of pushing all someone’s comments down to exactly −1 is worse (for LW, whether or not for the victim) than a policy of downvoting them all n times, for specific n, because it erases information. Suppose I post a stupid comment that someone votes down to −1, and an insightful one that gets up to +4; then along comes Eugine, leaves the first alone and votes the other one down to −1. And now they look exactly the same; Eugine has removed not only the evidence of my insight in the second case, but also the evidence of my stupidity in the first.
The information isn’t completely gone; from any comment whose net score isn’t zero and whose total number of votes isn’t too large you can reconstruct the upvote and downvote numbers by looking at the “% positive” figure. But that doesn’t distinguish between Eugine-downvotes and other downvotes, and e.g. the parent of this comment which is currently on (+2,56%) could be either +9-7 or +10-8. And, more to the point, “can be roughly determined by doing some calculation” is rather different from “can be seen immediately”; even in so far as the information isn’t lost, it’s severely obscured.
The more successful Eugine is in making karma uninformative, the less grounds he has for hoping that mass-downvoting someone will ruin their reputation or drive them away. But I doubt he’s thinking clearly enough or long-term enough for this to change his behaviour.
… Whether the parent of this is on +9-7 or +10-8, that’s more than 5 downvotes. Either Eugine is now using more downvote-socks, or some other people dislike it. The latter hypothesis is plausible: I can easily imagine someone reading it and thinking “oh, for God’s sake get this meta whining off LW”. FWIW, my reasons for not shutting up about it are (1) I think it’s of some anthropological interest, (2) I still have some hope that some day it will provoke the moderators into actually stopping and/or undoing Eugine’s mass-downvoting, and (3) I have reason to think that unfortunately Eugine’s behaviour has been instrumental in driving a bunch of people away from LW and hope that keeping it visible will make it less effective and therefore less likely to push people away. And, I confess, (4) I hope to mitigate any reputational effect his attacks might have on me by reminding readers that if it weren’t for Eugine’s vendetta my 30-day karma would be somewhere around +220 rather than +12 :-). Anyway, if anyone reading this has strong opinions about whether I should shut up about this stuff, I’d be interested to know them.
He is hitting Nancy, myself, yourself, Gleb, and possibly others. ETA: Other suspected recipients of his impotent rage: ChristianKI (low-priority target?).
All of which I find… tactically stupid. If he targeted me, well, I don’t care, and nobody else would care. (And hell, I’m the one who riled him up, so it would even make something like sense.) Targeting you and Gleb is targeting bystanders; that is likely to produce administrative response.
Targeting Nancy as well, however?
I poked the tiger. It decided to try to maul the dragon in response.
I don’t think he’s targeting me because you riled him up; I’ve been on his list for ages. It’s possible that he’s got more aggressive lately because you annoyed him, but it could also be e.g. because he’s had a lot of his identities banhammered lately.
It doesn’t look to me as if he’s targeting Nancy in general; I think he’s downvoting negative things said about him, and it happens that many of them are from Nancy. (For the obvious reason.)
that is likely to produce administrative response
Eugine’s original ban was for mass-downvoting. All subsequent action against him has been more because he keeps coming back despite his ban. I have never yet seen any administrative response that actually has any impact on his mass-downvoting. I assume this is, at least in part, because dealing with that requires more difficult investigation (grovelling through LW’s horrible database structure trying to figure out who’s voted how on what, searching out sockpuppets, etc.) and the people with technical custody of LW are time-starved.
(I wonder occasionally whether the most effective way to deal with the Eugine problem is to find a security hole that makes it possible to filch the LW database files, which could then be analysed without having to go via Trike. I am fairly sure that with actual direct access to the data, it would be pretty easy to identify all of Eugine’s socks and what votes they’ve cast. At the very least they could then be terminated with extreme prejudice; undoing all their votes might require writing a bit of code and therefore another Trike interaction. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not in fact proposing to hack LW in such a fashion. Not in the near future, anyway.)
It decided to maul the dragon in response.
I dunno. My mental model of Nancy is that she isn’t the sort to switch from inaction to action just because she starts being personally targeted.
[EDITED to add:] By “inaction” I don’t mean “doing literally nothing”, I mean “neither stopping nor undoing the karmabuse”. The moderators are clearly being fairly active in slapping down visible Eugine accounts.
Nancy isn’t the dragon, necessarily; she’s far too nice. The dragon is in that people like her, and her getting targeted is going to upset some people.
How will that do Eugine any harm? He seems to have mostly given up on actually posting visibly Eugine-y things, and to be concentrating on mass-downvoting his enemies with a shadowy network of sockpuppets. Ordinary LW users can’t do very much about that however annoyed they may be.
I suppose they could engage in mass-upvoting of comments from users he’s been targeting, but that wouldn’t in any useful sense solve the problem and would probably just result in Eugine gradually accumulating more sockpuppets to drown out their noise with more of his own.
Has Eugine’s mass-downvoting got more aggressive for everyone lately, or just for me? I am getting hit for 10 points or so per day; not only old comments but (I think) every comment I post, without exception.
[EDITED to add:] Of course by “everyone” I mean all Eugine’s targets. Actually I don’t know who else he’s gunning for at the moment; perhaps it’s just me.
Perhaps some of those downvotes are from other people and/or reflect actual deficiencies in what I post. But I bet the great majority are just Eugine being Eugine.
[EDITED to add:] Actually, this is interesting. At least some of my comments that are net-positive have lots of downvotes, in some cases more than seems plausible “organically”. E.g., this one appears to be on +7-5; I’m not sure it really deserves +7, but I’m extremely sure it doesn’t deserve −5. This one appears to be +6-5; a natural −5 seems more plausible here but still unlikely. This one is on +3-4. Some more, all mysteriously on just enough downvotes to come out negative: +1-2, +3-4, +2-3, +2-3, +2-3, +3-4, +2-3, +4-5, +3-4, +2-3, +3-4, +3-4. That’s twelve consecutive comments from my overview page, all of which just happen to be on exactly −1 despite substantial numbers of votes overall.
I expect some of those downvotes are honest downvotes. But I reckon (p=0.9) Eugine has a new strategy (well done, Eugine! Such creativity!): instead of downvoting everything once, downvote everything to −1 unless you run out of sockpuppets. (And we have weak evidence that Eugine has exactly 5 downvoting sockpuppets right now.)
[EDITED again to add:] Actually, it’s more like 30 points per day right now. I wonder what fraction of all upvotes and downvotes on LW in the last week have been Eugine.
[EDITED again to add:] About 45 points in the last 8 hours; my 30-day karma is now on −39 which is something like +305-344. “Normally” I think something like 5-10% of votes on my comments are downvotes, so I guess maybe 330 or so of those downvotes are Eugine’s. (Current estimated time to zero karma, assuming no relevant moderator action: maybe 8 months.)
Thanks for posting this. I’ve forwarded it to tech support.
How do you find new accounts?
I haven’t myself noticed a lot of new accounts other than ones I’ve already reported as likely-Eugines, and one other that I’m keeping an eye on—you might want to ask OrphanWilde, who is the one who reported seeing a lot of new accounts.
When I do notice new accounts it’s simply by seeing things in the “Recent Comments” written by users whose names I don’t recognize.
(If mods don’t have a tool for listing recently created accounts, that should go on whatever monstrous wishlist we have for LW features...)
it is on the wishlist.
I watch the new comments list, primarily, and check usernames I don’t recognize for posting histories.
Over the past week a larger-than-normal number of new accounts have appeared; none of them have exhibited Eugine’s usual behaviors, so thus far I’m just observing. If they have a tendency to write until they reach 10 karma and then stop, well, they’re probably silent puppets.
To my eye, there are… an unusual number of new accounts jumping immediately into posting, lately. None of them have Eugine’s trademark style or focus on his preferred topics, however.
I would be unsurprised to find that some of them are Eugine.
There’s an obvious solution, which I propose in a spirit of impartial generosity: Insta-ban any account that downvotes any of my comments :-).
(Horrifically, that might actually be an improvement on the present state of affairs. I hope it’s unnecessary to say that it would still be an absolutely terrible idea, but I’ll say it anyway just in case.)
I am keeping an eye on the individuals, at any rate. It will be interesting if he’s adopting a new tactic of -not- talking about the same tired talking points. It would suggest a level of cleverness he thus far has not demonstrated.
And once we get the tools in place to start tracking downvote patterns, that game will be up, too.
Related xkcd
My question is: why the heck are you such a dangerous person to Eugene? What point of view do you hold that Eugene deems so worthy of mass downvoting? Ironically for him, now I want to know.
At this point I think it’s mostly a personal vendetta on his part. But back when he wasn’t just downvoting practically everything I ever post, his mass-downvoting was usually triggered by my having the temerity to disagree with him about one of his three hot-button issues: (1) whether black people are stupid, lazy and dangerous, (2) whether women are mentally unsuited for science, engineering, etc., and (3) whether transgender people should be called “trannies”, addressed by their “old” pronouns, etc.
(Eugine would not necessarily express his positions in the way I have suggested there. But e.g. when presented with a list of highly successful black people—after he suggested there are no successful black people for a “black pride” event to celebrate—he described them as “basically dancing bears”. Make of that what you will.)
You forgot something: Eugine holds that anyone who disagrees with these views is insufficiently rational and doesn’t belong on Less Wrong.
He decided at one point that there were too many such irrational people, and engaged in a mass-downvote campaign to punish his ideological enemies; he was banned for this, and keeps coming back, like a sad dumb little puppy who can’t understand why he gets punished for shitting on the carpet.
I’m curious; did you choose that analogy on purpose?
Anyway: yes, I agree, I think Eugine thinks that lack of enthusiasm for bigotry ⇒ denial of biological realities ⇒ stupid irrationality ⇒ doesn’t belong on LW, and that’s part of what’s going on here. But I am pretty sure that Eugine or anyone else would search in vain[1] for anything I’ve said on LW that denies biological realities, and that being wrong about one controversial topic doesn’t by any means imply stupid irrationality—and I think it’s at least partly the personal-vendetta thing, and partly a severe case of political mindkilling, that stops him noticing those things.
[1] And not only because searching for anything on LW is a pain in the (ahahahaha) posterior.
Not in that regard, no. I’m actually vaguely in favor of the Sad Puppies, as I think that Larry Correia has some significant points, although I think, as with Correia, that the point was already made, and at this point I regard it as largely a political exercise.
Which is to say, I agree with the original purpose of demonstrating that there is a bias at play (given the staunch denials that such a bias existed), but have little interest in their efforts at fighting the bias. I don’t care about the award, I don’t care who it goes to; it was never a selling point to me, and never will be.
The Rabid Puppies… I find boring and childish. They hopped on the bandwagon entirely to piss off people they enjoy pissing off.
Reminds me of:
A relevant note is that “dancing bear” is a trope.
I’d actually meant to link to that exact page, but forgot.
Eugine likely sees gjm as pro-SJW
Remark: a policy of pushing all someone’s comments down to exactly −1 is worse (for LW, whether or not for the victim) than a policy of downvoting them all n times, for specific n, because it erases information. Suppose I post a stupid comment that someone votes down to −1, and an insightful one that gets up to +4; then along comes Eugine, leaves the first alone and votes the other one down to −1. And now they look exactly the same; Eugine has removed not only the evidence of my insight in the second case, but also the evidence of my stupidity in the first.
The information isn’t completely gone; from any comment whose net score isn’t zero and whose total number of votes isn’t too large you can reconstruct the upvote and downvote numbers by looking at the “% positive” figure. But that doesn’t distinguish between Eugine-downvotes and other downvotes, and e.g. the parent of this comment which is currently on (+2,56%) could be either +9-7 or +10-8. And, more to the point, “can be roughly determined by doing some calculation” is rather different from “can be seen immediately”; even in so far as the information isn’t lost, it’s severely obscured.
The more successful Eugine is in making karma uninformative, the less grounds he has for hoping that mass-downvoting someone will ruin their reputation or drive them away. But I doubt he’s thinking clearly enough or long-term enough for this to change his behaviour.
… Whether the parent of this is on +9-7 or +10-8, that’s more than 5 downvotes. Either Eugine is now using more downvote-socks, or some other people dislike it. The latter hypothesis is plausible: I can easily imagine someone reading it and thinking “oh, for God’s sake get this meta whining off LW”. FWIW, my reasons for not shutting up about it are (1) I think it’s of some anthropological interest, (2) I still have some hope that some day it will provoke the moderators into actually stopping and/or undoing Eugine’s mass-downvoting, and (3) I have reason to think that unfortunately Eugine’s behaviour has been instrumental in driving a bunch of people away from LW and hope that keeping it visible will make it less effective and therefore less likely to push people away. And, I confess, (4) I hope to mitigate any reputational effect his attacks might have on me by reminding readers that if it weren’t for Eugine’s vendetta my 30-day karma would be somewhere around +220 rather than +12 :-). Anyway, if anyone reading this has strong opinions about whether I should shut up about this stuff, I’d be interested to know them.
He is hitting Nancy, myself, yourself, Gleb, and possibly others. ETA: Other suspected recipients of his impotent rage: ChristianKI (low-priority target?).
All of which I find… tactically stupid. If he targeted me, well, I don’t care, and nobody else would care. (And hell, I’m the one who riled him up, so it would even make something like sense.) Targeting you and Gleb is targeting bystanders; that is likely to produce administrative response.
Targeting Nancy as well, however?
I poked the tiger. It decided to try to maul the dragon in response.
I don’t think he’s targeting me because you riled him up; I’ve been on his list for ages. It’s possible that he’s got more aggressive lately because you annoyed him, but it could also be e.g. because he’s had a lot of his identities banhammered lately.
It doesn’t look to me as if he’s targeting Nancy in general; I think he’s downvoting negative things said about him, and it happens that many of them are from Nancy. (For the obvious reason.)
Eugine’s original ban was for mass-downvoting. All subsequent action against him has been more because he keeps coming back despite his ban. I have never yet seen any administrative response that actually has any impact on his mass-downvoting. I assume this is, at least in part, because dealing with that requires more difficult investigation (grovelling through LW’s horrible database structure trying to figure out who’s voted how on what, searching out sockpuppets, etc.) and the people with technical custody of LW are time-starved.
(I wonder occasionally whether the most effective way to deal with the Eugine problem is to find a security hole that makes it possible to filch the LW database files, which could then be analysed without having to go via Trike. I am fairly sure that with actual direct access to the data, it would be pretty easy to identify all of Eugine’s socks and what votes they’ve cast. At the very least they could then be terminated with extreme prejudice; undoing all their votes might require writing a bit of code and therefore another Trike interaction. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not in fact proposing to hack LW in such a fashion. Not in the near future, anyway.)
I dunno. My mental model of Nancy is that she isn’t the sort to switch from inaction to action just because she starts being personally targeted.
[EDITED to add:] By “inaction” I don’t mean “doing literally nothing”, I mean “neither stopping nor undoing the karmabuse”. The moderators are clearly being fairly active in slapping down visible Eugine accounts.
Nancy isn’t the dragon, necessarily; she’s far too nice. The dragon is in that people like her, and her getting targeted is going to upset some people.
Hell, I’m annoyed.
How will that do Eugine any harm? He seems to have mostly given up on actually posting visibly Eugine-y things, and to be concentrating on mass-downvoting his enemies with a shadowy network of sockpuppets. Ordinary LW users can’t do very much about that however annoyed they may be.
I suppose they could engage in mass-upvoting of comments from users he’s been targeting, but that wouldn’t in any useful sense solve the problem and would probably just result in Eugine gradually accumulating more sockpuppets to drown out their noise with more of his own.
Eugine still cares. You don’t carry out a multi-year campaign to try to subvert a site you don’t care about.
He’s extremely sensitive about his ideas, and how people here regard them.