Sometimes there is a good reason for this effect (not sure how often it applies): when you first notice a user and look through the last couple of pages of their comments, it might turn out that you don't like most of what you see, and so a significant portion of the last dozen comments get downvoted. Such voting is not noise, it reflects the judgment of the content. The reason for high correlation in judgment is not indiscriminate action, but merely that it is the same person that is doing the evaluation of a batch of your work. (It is easy to imagine how this pattern would turn to abuse, but it's not automatically abuse. There is also selection effect.)
What's happening to ialdabaoth is more extreme: about 98%* of their comments are being downvoted, that's happening repeatedly, and it even happens to comments that the rest of LW unanimously likes. To me that looks like indiscriminate & abusive downvoting, even allowing for the correlation in an individual's judgements.
* Skimming the last year-ish of ialdabaoth's user overview, I count 196 downvoted posts & comments out of 200. The most recent exception is a comment they redacted before anyone voted on it; the other three exceptions are these.
What's happening to ialdabaoth is more extreme: about 98%* of their comments are being downvoted, that's happening repeatedly, and it even happens to comments that the rest of LW unanimously likes. To me that looks like indiscriminate & abusive downvoting, even allowing for the correlation in an individual's judgements.
Also, I can personally attest that each of the "universally liked" examples you gave were downvoted during a large downvoting block.
I have a pretty good idea of what's happening, and a reasonable amount of evidence of who's doing it; right now, I just want to work out some kind of truce.
If it continues, I'd like to see a search done for the culprit, have them publicly exposed, and their account permanently locked or destroyed. There's no place for that kind of personal grudge in the future I wish to live in.
Witch hunts are characterized by lack of evidence; that should not be the case here. The admin in charge of the system should be able to pull up the relevant data, do ten minutes of analysis, and say definitively yes or no whether there's abusive downvoting going on.
If there is, I'd like to see action taken, because karma is one of our better quality indicators on the site.
You're right; I guess it's not the witch-hunt side so much as the ad-hoc mob rule that bothers me. I express controversial views on LW, both through my posts and through my moderation; I think the fact that one can do so is one of the most valuable things about the site. The idea that one could be severely punished for an action that didn't violate any specific rule, but was merely something many in the community disagreed with, would be very chilling.
the ad-hoc mob rule that bothers me
(shrug) One person's "ad-hoc mob rule" is another's "collective self-moderation".
For my own part, I endorse the collectively self-moderating aspect of LW, of which downvotes are an important aspect. Yes, it makes the community vulnerable to various forms of self-abuse. Eliminating it also makes the community vulnerable to various forms of self-abuse, which are not clearly superior, to say the least.
The idea that one could be severely punished for an action that didn't violate any specific rule, but was merely something many in the community disagreed with, would be very chilling.
For my own part: I endorse people downvoting what they want to see less of on the site.
If Sam wants to see less of George posting on the site, it follows that I endorse Sam block-downvoting every one of George's comments. I'm a little squeamish about that, and I would prefer that Sam had different preferences, but if it comes down to that I stand by the endorsement.
If I post something that many in the community disagree with, and those community members want to see less stuff they disagree with, I endorse those community members downvoting me...
When a newcomer starts trolling the site, they could very easily have a full corpus of contribution of, say, six posts, all of which are unambiguously worthy of downvoting. A rule which institutes a blanket prohibition against downvoting all of someone's posts isn't robust against circumstances such as those.
Too damned easy to rules-lawyer. You can't downvote all of someone's posts, but what percentage can you downvote?
You just have to have public audits of the enforcers. Frankly, in this case, name-and-shame might be enough; ialdabaoth has seized the moral high ground by publicly offering truce.
The weird downvotes I've gotten don't match the pattern other people have mentioned. Instead of mass downvoting of comments, I get a very early downvote (maybe a bit more than one, I haven't checked carefully) on posts. It might be a different person.
I agree that mass downvoting is bad for the community, with no obvious upside to permitting it. Taking away the perpetrator's downvote button seems like a reasonable punishment.
There's another reason to check: right now, we have an outstanding accusation against a respected user in the community . That user has not responded to that accusation. In a court of law (at least in the US), that would (generally) not be allowed as evidence of guilt, but from a Bayesian standpoint it does seem like P(Eugine Nier is systematically downvoting|Eugine doesn't deny it)> P(Eugine is systematically downvoting|Eugine denies it).
Now, there are other plausible explanations also for why he has decided not to comment, and at this point, I'd assign no more than 50% or so that he's responsible for this situation. If he's not responsible, then his name is being unfairly dragged through the mud, and that should be stopped. So it is important simply for that reason to have this cleared up. My own emotional biases may be coming into play here, in that although I disagree with Eugine on most of the issues that seem to be triggering mass downvoting (essentially on the progressive end of the gender and race issues), I've generally found him to be one of the more reasonable and polite people to disagree with here, so I'd really like to have it confirmed that he's not at fault here.
Potential data point: I just got a block downvote across all my recent comments, and that happened after I had this conversation, and just happened in a space of about sixty seconds, with a net of -9 karma. Downvoted comments consist of my entire front page of comments regardless of topic. Edit:And the timing was literally just when the user Ialdabaoth suspected showed up to write this.
When the mass downvoting started, it very nearly mindkilled me. There's something deep-set that gets triggered when you KNOW you're being fucked with, and you KNOW you can't do anything about it but retaliate in kind. I had to put up a few hasty new Schelling fences to not descend to the same level of bullshit.
The downvote-stalker process is memetically contagious.
So you are basically saying that you had a downvoting war with another person and while you stopped downvoting them, they didn't stop downvoting you?
No, I'm saying I had a very, VERY strong impulse to respond to a perceived downvoting spat by turning it into a downvoting war. I did not actually retaliate.
And it is unlikely for the foreseeable future that the mods are going to o anything.
Just pointing out that this IS a problem that is temporarily solvable by collective action. If about five people decided to karmassassinate the user in question, they could keep his karma at 0, which I believe would stop him from being able to downvote (until he set up a sock).
(Interestingly, I'm quite fine with losing a significant amount of karma if this post gets heavily downvoted because people don't like the idea of mob rule. I really don't care about my karma number. But there's a big difference between losing magic internet points because people disagree with what you say, versus someone following you around downvoting you, which feels stalkery/predatory.)
Frankly, having read through a number of the user in question's posts, I'm ok with that, but I don't think it'll work. He seems to get his karma from rationality quote posting, which is a powerful karma generator. His actual comments are IMHO rarely worthy of an upvote and often deserving of a downvote, but he gains much karma from posting other people's brilliance.
This is in general problem. There are other users who seem to do this also, but they don't post as frequently so it hasn't created as much of a problem. But in this particular case, it may also be instructive to look at where the quotes are coming from. A fundamental idea behind the rationality quotes is that rational thinking should be taken from wherever one finds it. And in the past there have been well-received quotes even from Jack Chick and the Unabomber. But, in this particular instance, a large section of the quotes come from people involved in a specific end of American politics. That may indicate further problems given the consistent nature of who is being quoted. It looks like they may see the quote threads as further opportunity to advertise their preferred politics an political writers.
It's happened to me as well. I argued in favor of an unpopular view and some joker down-voted all of my posts, even ones that had nothing to do with the view in question.
My solution is not to worry so much about karma. Even without the problem of block-downvoting, there are too many other problems with it to make it useful feedback.
Perhaps the block-downvoting problem could be handled by publicizing some of the information about peoples' up and downvotes. On a slightly different note, I would not be surprised at all if it turns out that some posters are operating smite-puppets to downvote their perceived enemies and sock-puppets to upvote their own posts. Or if there are pairs or groups of upvote-allies.
As a data point for those questioning my motives: on a purely emotional level, it is frustrating and depressing to see my "I participated in the survey!" get down-voted to -1 within minutes of posting, especially when the ONLY OTHER negative-karma post in that thread is someone being unambiguously antisocial.
I'm tired of being reminded that no matter WHERE I go, there will be people who disapprove of my very existence.
[I] would like to be able to use karma to honestly appraise the worth of my articles and posts
Simple: You know the pattern of the signal pollution, so for your own purposes, you can easily correct for it.
Edit: Also, "worth" != "popularity within a selected subset of LW readers", especially if you'd apparently like to construe a correlation as any kind of exact metric. Since you probably know that yourself, your stated reasoning seems a bit like a red herring. What remains is a de facto witchhunt, personal drama celebrated in a public space. Unwarranted, the situation is clear enough: Someone doesn't like you around, and is expressing that. If your PMs were unsuccessful and you apparently know who it is, do you seriously expect such a veiled public threat of shaming/appeal to work, especially vis-a-vis the risk of further aggravating the situation? If you don't (which would be the sensible assumption), consider the signal pollution via this very post ... count me among those who've had their fill of meta posts.
Are you frustrated because you want to see substantive and interesting posts in the discussion section, and not just meta issues? I think you have some common ground with ialdabaoth that you may be missing.
Here we have a valued and contributing member of the community who is frustrated with their recent experience and is reaching out to the rest of us for help. Your response sounds like a your-problem-is-not-a-problem solution. Couldn't someone make the same kind of reply to you? (e.g. "If you don't like meta-posts, just skip them. This one was even clearly labeled as meta!")
Currently, as far as I'm aware, LessWrong doesn't have any place other than Discussion to discuss meta issues. Perhaps one is needed?
It is perhaps worth remembering that the original stated purpose of downvotes was to allow LW users to weed out low-quality contributions/contributors in an egalitarian fashion (that is, without the need for privileged users to perform privileged acts of weeding).
Consider an egalitarian mechanism X that allows a community to keep out low-quality contributors. The only way I can think of for such a community to prevent a rogue agent A from using X to keep out high-quality contributors is to ensure that the bulk of the community can tell the difference, agrees on the difference, and is prepared to use X accordingly. Once the community has reached the point where the amount of X-use A can invoke in a particular area is a significant fraction of the total amount of X-use the community as a whole invokes in that area (for example, if A bulk-downvotes user B, and the net downvotes thus created are a significant fraction of the total votes for B), X will predictably fail to keep out low-quality contributors. (Shortly past that point, X will predictably start to be used to keep out high-quality contributors.)
The discussion thus far has mostly de-facto agreed to this, and is therefore tak...
If I'm understanding you correctly, your position is that since downvoting has been corrupted we need a new egalitarian mechanism, such as calling out jerks, and that if we all use that mechanism reliably we can clean up the community.
Well, not exactly. I'm not proposing "calling out jerks" as an alternative to downvoting as a mechanism for weeding out low-quality contributions. I'm saying that there are different kinds of contributions to the community that we want to discourage. We want to discourage poor-quality comments, of course, and I still think downvoting is a decent (not perfect, but decent) way of doing that. I don't think the block-downvoting we've seen so far changes that.
But we also want to discourage harmful contributions that don't come in the form of poor comments. Passive-aggressive voting behavior is a harmful contribution to this community, in so far as it jeopardizes the "community" aspect. Voluntary communities should, on balance, be pleasant places to be in, at least for the kind of people the community wants. Block-downvoting makes the community a less pleasant place (to the extent, apparently, that it has already de facto driven out o...
Let me point out that the usual way to deal with this issue is to loudly yell
ADMIN!!!!
Someone with admin privileges for the website, specifically, access to logs and/or the underlying DB can easily establish the truth. The only issue is whether admins care enough to do that.
People have yelled "Admin!" about downvote-abuse before, and so far as I know there is no instance in which any admin has visibly done anything in response.
Perhaps the admins don't care. Perhaps they happen not to have read any of the threads in which this has happened. Perhaps they don't want to encourage LW users to put effort into this sort of meta-issue. Perhaps one or more admins are downvote-abusers.
Whatever the reason(s), I think just shouting "Admin!" won't do much good unless it's accompanied by some kind of reason why an admin should take action, that they mightn't already have thought about and decided wasn't enough.
I think it might be a good idea for admin to get involved now, either to explain what action they'll take or to explain why they're not taking any action. The reasons for admin to get involved are:
1)It makes karma a less effective way of signalling the quality of a user's comments
2)IT seems to have happened to several people
3)It upsets people, and makes them less likely to post here
4)It might cause drama (someone has publicly named a karma abuser below)
It's not just you. A few folks have noticed this specific bad behavior.
Mathematically, just correct for it.
Socially, consider that it means that you're posting things that a defector (boo! boo!) disapproves of.
Alternately, one of these days, one of us should run some sort of analysis correlating mass downvoting and other site activity ....
(Also, consider this a measure of the effect that one bored person can have, and the situation that person might be in. As far as I can tell, there's only one mass-downvoter. Consider their lonesome plight!)
The obvious alternative hypothesis is that there are different single downvoters, independently targeting different people.
Eugine's karma ratio for the past month has dropped from 75 % to 52 % after you named him. What do you think of that?
As a separate follow-up to this question, I went ahead and looked at Eugine's posts for the past few weeks. It looks like EVERYTHING he's posting is getting downvoted, even comments that are straightforward and reasonable.
...
Come on, guys. Where does this end?
Let's examine consequential goals, here:
If your goal is to stop Eugine Nier from having enough karma to downvote people, you don't have to destroy everything he posts - and doing so is especially problematic, given that he sometimes has reasonably insightful things to say. You can solve this problem by simply downvoting him when he's being deliberately contentious, and downvoting him when he's quote-mining. When he has something actually worth listening to, upvote it (or at the very least, don't downvote it).
If your goal is to send him a message, then downvoting EVERYTHING just sends the message "be more powerful and you win", whereas downvoting only those posts relating to politics/social issues sends a more nuanced message.
If your goal is to signal to the administrators that the karma system is broken, then JUST block-downvoting Eugine won't do that; we need to turn the whole site into a ridiculous mess. (Tongue-in...
wanting less of a particular user's contributions is a legitimate reason to downvote that user's contributions, regardless of the particular content of a specific comment.
While I in theory agree with this, I wouldn't want to see this become common in practice. The problem is, you don't need that many users to karmassassinate someone completely. That makes the process potentially really nondemocratic and noisy. You could say that other users could correct for abusive downvoting by upvoting, but I doubt this actually happens enough.
I haven't been downvoting Eugine lately, nor am I downvoting anyone for your sake, but I will restate my position here that wanting less of a particular user's contributions is a legitimate reason to downvote that user's contributions, regardless of the particular content of a specific comment.
I'm curious about this. Why would you want less of a particular user's contributions, if not for the content of those contributions?
I think a lot of different things, because this is a rather emotionally complex situation for me. Some of the things I think about that I can't discuss, because people in PM and off-site have specifically asked me not to. But if I reframe your question into "did I do the right thing?", I don't know. It'll take some amount of time and processing before I can really forge a useable lesson out of all of this.
But I have a counter-question for you: if you have a good deal of evidence that someone is doing things that you consider wrong, AND that more people than just you are being negatively affected, AND that there is no governing body to appeal to, at what probability threshold should you announce your suspicions and request correlation? At what probability threshold should you act?
I would like in particular to hear daenerys's answer to that question as well, to weigh with or against your own.
I've experienced the same thing. I used to be annoyed when my karma suddenly dropped by 10 points, but more recently I had a 100 point drop within a time span of less than an hour. I'm guessing I'm growing more susceptible to it as my post count increases. I honestly don't know what to do about this kind of thing, so for now I've decided to simply abstain from caring too much.
It would be nice if there were some sort of forum rule that prevented people from downvoting a single person too many times. That's the best solution I can see right now, though it's not perfect.
I'm just tired of the signal pollution, and would like to be able to use karma to honestly appraise the worth of my articles and posts, without seeing 80% of my downvotes come in chunks that correspond precisely to how many posts I've made since the last massive downvote spree.
EDIT to add data points:
Spurious downvoting stopped soon after I named a particular individual (not ALL downvoting stopped, but the downvotes I got all seemed on-the-level.)
One block of potentially spurious downvoting occurred approximately one week ago, but then karma patterns returned to expected levels. I consider this block dubious, because it reasonably matches what I'd expect to see if someone noticed several of my posts together and disagreed with all of them, and did not match the usual pattern of starting with the earliest or latest post that I had made and downvoting everything (it downvoted all posts in a few threads, but not in other threads), so I'm just adding for completeness.
Spurious, indiscriminate downvoting started up again approximately half an hour ago on Sunday (12/1/2013), around noon MDT.
Edit: And now on Tuesday, 12/3/2013, at 10 AM, I'm watching my karma go down again... about 30 points so far.
Edit: And now on Saturday, 12/14/2013, at 2 PM, I'm watching my karma go down again... about 15 points so far, at a rate of about 1-2 points per second.