In the past few hours, my total karma score has dropped by fifteen points. It looks like someone is going back through my old comments and downvoting them. A quick sample suggests that they’ve hit everything I’ve posted since some time in August, regardless of topic.
Is this happening to anyone else?
Anyone with appropriate access care to investigate?
To whoever’s doing this — Here’s the signal that your action sends to me: “Someone, about whom all you know is that they have an LW account that they use to abuse the voting system, doesn’t like you.” This is probably not what you mean to convey, but it’s what comes across.
Maybe it’s just me not knowing much about website design, but this seems like a problem which could be mitigated with automatic controls on the karma system. Like, for example, you have a limit of +/- n net Karma you can award to any given poster in an arbitrary time limit t. Or even that if your rate of downvoting any given poster cracks some ceiling it sends up an automatic mod flag that there might be an attack going on.
Ideally, of course, we could just abide by the honor system, but from a pragmatic perspective it might make more sense to set up stronger safeguards as an additional measure.
Like, for example, you have a limit of +/- n net Karma you can award to any given poster in an arbitrary time limit t.
That can be also implemented more softly by still allowing anyone to vote anyone as much as they want, but requiring a captcha for each vote after a given limit.
In the past few hours, my total karma score has dropped by fifteen points. It looks like someone is going back through my old comments and downvoting them. A quick sample suggests that they’ve hit everything I’ve posted since some time in August, regardless of topic.
Is this happening to anyone else?
Anyone with appropriate access care to investigate?
To whoever’s doing this — Here’s the signal that your action sends to me: “Someone, about whom all you know is that they have an LW account that they use to abuse the voting system, doesn’t like you.” This is probably not what you mean to convey, but it’s what comes across.
That kind of stuff happens quite often.
Maybe it’s just me not knowing much about website design, but this seems like a problem which could be mitigated with automatic controls on the karma system. Like, for example, you have a limit of +/- n net Karma you can award to any given poster in an arbitrary time limit t. Or even that if your rate of downvoting any given poster cracks some ceiling it sends up an automatic mod flag that there might be an attack going on.
Ideally, of course, we could just abide by the honor system, but from a pragmatic perspective it might make more sense to set up stronger safeguards as an additional measure.
That can be also implemented more softly by still allowing anyone to vote anyone as much as they want, but requiring a captcha for each vote after a given limit.