My impression is that it accelerated the departure of lefty and/or female LWers by more than a hair.
Any specifics?
One lefty female comes to mind, but I believe she left LW basically because she didn’t find NRx (and possibly HBD) pushback acceptable. It was more like she didn’t want to be in the same forum with people holding such views.
Such departures, IMHO, cannot and should not be helped.
Is there anyone who left LW specifically because of karma harassment?
And, over on Slate Star Codex (where there are no links to individual comments; sorry), go to this thread and search for “Because I got mod-bombed” you’ll find ialdabaoth saying that’s why they left LW; if you read other comments near that one you’ll find a bunch of other people saying they left and/or are considering leaving because they don’t like how it feels to get heavily downvoted; they aren’t (I think) talking about Euginification, but if (1) it’s common to be pushed away from places like LW because being heavily downvoted is unpleasant, and (2) there is someone around throwing heavy downvoting at people whose politics he doesn’t like, there’s an obvious conclusion to draw.
I don’t know the politics (or, in several cases, the gender) of the people I’m pointing at, so I am not going to claim them as examples of “lefty and/or female LWers” specifically; but, again, if we have evidence (1) that mass-downvoting encourages people to leave and (2) that mass-downvoting is preferentially targeted at those who are lefty and/or female, then there’s an obvious conclusion to draw.
[EDITED to add:] I am pretty sure I remember other people saying things like “I got mass-downvoted and it makes me feel really negative about LW and I hardly post here any more”, but the above is all that a few minutes’ googling turned up and more research than that seems unwarranted. Also, while looking I found this study of the impact of voting on user behaviour, which doesn’t find that downvoting drives people away (but doesn’t, I think, look at all at the sort of mass-downvoting LW suffers from); I am linking it here (1) because cherry-picking is bad and (2) because it’s an interesting paper anyway.
I’m a conservative, so I might be biased, but the notion that Lesswrong is culturally unwelcome to lefties strikes me as not just wrong, but funny. In any given scan of the site, I’ll see 3-4 things that offend me.
Threads will contain, not as the point of the thread, but just as background noise, as assumptions with which the writer presumes everyone will agree, atheism, pro choice stuff, polyamory (usually with same sex stuff relationships in there), discussions of how cool it will be once we turn out bodies into robots, etc.
I recognize that it is possible that the site is somehow also offensive to progressives and I simply miss out on all of the conservative talking points because they are transparent to me (fish don’t see the water that they swim in, etc.), but I don’t think that’s the case.
I’m not claiming that LW is generally hostile to lefties, nor that there aren’t things that happen here that might annoy righties or push them away, nor that overall it’s worse for lefties than for righties. Only that one particular thing that happens here makes LW more unpleasant for lefties than it need be and drives some away.
(I would prefer LW to be a place where people with any political proclivities at all can feel welcome, unless those proclivities are severely and overtly anti-rational or so obnoxious as to render them unwelcome pretty much everywhere.)
I agree with this if you simply look at the site as it is, but the kind of movement that gjm is talking about has certainly happened, and Eugene’s downvoting may have contributed to that.
Some years ago, if you even mentioned religion or a culturally conservative practice without saying something negative about it, you would very likely be downvoted. I’m pretty sure that even happened to gjm on at least one occasion—he was downvoted and added, “I don’t see what’s wrong with this comment,” and I’m pretty sure it was downvoted just because he didn’t add something negative when he mentioned religion.
That is obviously not the case anymore with religion. And I just recently was giving some arguments favoring a policy of no sex before marriage, without that kind of result. Of course people still disagreed, but they didn’t object to the fact that someone was arguing that point.
So it seems to me true that there has been a substantial amount of movement, even if it is still true overall that LW is more leftwing than not.
Some people did. Some people left for other reasons. One of those reasons was disliking getting downvoted a lot. In one case, it was specifically disliking getting mass-downvoted by Eugine. Which happens to be what you asked for.
(I agree that most people who have left LW have left for reasons other than getting mass-downvoted by Eugine. I hadn’t thought that was under any sort of dispute.)
“Mod-bombed” is strange expression. I find it probable that at least some people left LW because of karma harassment. However my impression stands—what made LW barren is people leaving because it stopped being interesting. But judging by the volume of discussion about particular reasons for leaving, you’d never guess that :-/
And they left because they were done with their respective projects, and maybe because of negative comments.
Eliezer had said the things he was planning to say with the sequences and had found new research fellows to start working on AI again.
Yvain was a sock puppet that Scott used on a role playing forum he was active on and did some LW posts as backstopping. Then he continued posting here for a while but writing without politics and not under his own name felt too much like hard work. Now his entire blog is pseudonymous because writing about politics under your own name is not such a good idea, but it is still all about political conversations rather than the sciency stuff he did as Yvain.
But it was not about Eugine or downvotes because they always got much more upvotes than downvotes on damn near every comment and every post.
Any specifics?
One lefty female comes to mind, but I believe she left LW basically because she didn’t find NRx (and possibly HBD) pushback acceptable. It was more like she didn’t want to be in the same forum with people holding such views.
Such departures, IMHO, cannot and should not be helped.
Is there anyone who left LW specifically because of karma harassment?
It’s hard to tell; people don’t usually bother saying why they’re going. But I can offer someone saying they almost left because of a single incident of mass-downvoting. And daenerys (who has since left LW) saying that mass-downvoting is discouraging her from participating much, though at that point she evidently had no plans to leave altogether.
And, over on Slate Star Codex (where there are no links to individual comments; sorry), go to this thread and search for “Because I got mod-bombed” you’ll find ialdabaoth saying that’s why they left LW; if you read other comments near that one you’ll find a bunch of other people saying they left and/or are considering leaving because they don’t like how it feels to get heavily downvoted; they aren’t (I think) talking about Euginification, but if (1) it’s common to be pushed away from places like LW because being heavily downvoted is unpleasant, and (2) there is someone around throwing heavy downvoting at people whose politics he doesn’t like, there’s an obvious conclusion to draw.
I don’t know the politics (or, in several cases, the gender) of the people I’m pointing at, so I am not going to claim them as examples of “lefty and/or female LWers” specifically; but, again, if we have evidence (1) that mass-downvoting encourages people to leave and (2) that mass-downvoting is preferentially targeted at those who are lefty and/or female, then there’s an obvious conclusion to draw.
[EDITED to add:] I am pretty sure I remember other people saying things like “I got mass-downvoted and it makes me feel really negative about LW and I hardly post here any more”, but the above is all that a few minutes’ googling turned up and more research than that seems unwarranted. Also, while looking I found this study of the impact of voting on user behaviour, which doesn’t find that downvoting drives people away (but doesn’t, I think, look at all at the sort of mass-downvoting LW suffers from); I am linking it here (1) because cherry-picking is bad and (2) because it’s an interesting paper anyway.
I’m a conservative, so I might be biased, but the notion that Lesswrong is culturally unwelcome to lefties strikes me as not just wrong, but funny. In any given scan of the site, I’ll see 3-4 things that offend me.
Threads will contain, not as the point of the thread, but just as background noise, as assumptions with which the writer presumes everyone will agree, atheism, pro choice stuff, polyamory (usually with same sex stuff relationships in there), discussions of how cool it will be once we turn out bodies into robots, etc.
I recognize that it is possible that the site is somehow also offensive to progressives and I simply miss out on all of the conservative talking points because they are transparent to me (fish don’t see the water that they swim in, etc.), but I don’t think that’s the case.
I’m not claiming that LW is generally hostile to lefties, nor that there aren’t things that happen here that might annoy righties or push them away, nor that overall it’s worse for lefties than for righties. Only that one particular thing that happens here makes LW more unpleasant for lefties than it need be and drives some away.
(I would prefer LW to be a place where people with any political proclivities at all can feel welcome, unless those proclivities are severely and overtly anti-rational or so obnoxious as to render them unwelcome pretty much everywhere.)
I agree with this if you simply look at the site as it is, but the kind of movement that gjm is talking about has certainly happened, and Eugene’s downvoting may have contributed to that.
Some years ago, if you even mentioned religion or a culturally conservative practice without saying something negative about it, you would very likely be downvoted. I’m pretty sure that even happened to gjm on at least one occasion—he was downvoted and added, “I don’t see what’s wrong with this comment,” and I’m pretty sure it was downvoted just because he didn’t add something negative when he mentioned religion.
That is obviously not the case anymore with religion. And I just recently was giving some arguments favoring a policy of no sex before marriage, without that kind of result. Of course people still disagreed, but they didn’t object to the fact that someone was arguing that point.
So it seems to me true that there has been a substantial amount of movement, even if it is still true overall that LW is more leftwing than not.
A comment’s date and time is a permalink to that comment. Here’s Ialdabaoth’s “mod-bombed” comment.
D’oh! Thanks.
(I have a feeling I’ve made the same mistake before and had it pointed out before. Perhaps I’ll remember next time.)
An interesting thread. My overwhelming impression from it is that people left LW because it stopped being interesting.
Some people did. Some people left for other reasons. One of those reasons was disliking getting downvoted a lot. In one case, it was specifically disliking getting mass-downvoted by Eugine. Which happens to be what you asked for.
(I agree that most people who have left LW have left for reasons other than getting mass-downvoted by Eugine. I hadn’t thought that was under any sort of dispute.)
“Mod-bombed” is strange expression. I find it probable that at least some people left LW because of karma harassment. However my impression stands—what made LW barren is people leaving because it stopped being interesting. But judging by the volume of discussion about particular reasons for leaving, you’d never guess that :-/
And vice versa.
LW would probably still be interesting if certain people (e.g. Eliezer and Yvain) still regularly posted here.
And they left because they were done with their respective projects, and maybe because of negative comments.
Eliezer had said the things he was planning to say with the sequences and had found new research fellows to start working on AI again.
Yvain was a sock puppet that Scott used on a role playing forum he was active on and did some LW posts as backstopping. Then he continued posting here for a while but writing without politics and not under his own name felt too much like hard work. Now his entire blog is pseudonymous because writing about politics under your own name is not such a good idea, but it is still all about political conversations rather than the sciency stuff he did as Yvain.
But it was not about Eugine or downvotes because they always got much more upvotes than downvotes on damn near every comment and every post.
Yep. It’s a negative feedback loop, there’s a reason it’s known as the death spiral.
I know one such person offline. Could be the only one, could be more of them. We don’t know.