As previously discussed, on June 6th I received a message from jackk, a Trike Admin. He reported that the user Jiro had asked Trike to carry out an investigation to the retributive downvoting that Jiro had been subjected to. The investigation revealed that the user Eugine_Nier had downvoted over half of Jiro's comments, amounting to hundreds of downvotes.

I asked the community's guidance on dealing with the issue, and while the matter was being discussed, I also reviewed previous discussions about mass downvoting and looked for other people who mentioned being the victims of it. I asked Jack to compile reports on several other users who mentioned having been mass-downvoted, and it turned out that Eugine was also overwhelmingly the biggest downvoter of users David_Gerard, daenarys, falenas108, ialdabaoth, shminux, and Tenoke. As this discussion was going on, it turned out that user Ander had also been targeted by Eugine.

I sent two messages to Eugine, requesting an explanation. I received a response today. Eugine admitted his guilt, expressing the opinion that LW's karma system was failing to carry out its purpose of keeping out weak material and that he was engaged in a "weeding" of users who he did not think displayed sufficient rationality.

Needless to say, it is not the place of individual users to unilaterally decide that someone else should be "weeded" out of the community. The Less Wrong content deletion policy contains this clause:

Harrassment of individual users.

If we determine that you're e.g. following a particular user around and leaving insulting comments to them, we reserve the right to delete those comments. (This has happened extremely rarely.)

Although the wording does not explicitly mention downvoting, harassment by downvoting is still harassment. Several users have indicated that they have experienced considerable emotional anguish from the harassment, and have in some cases been discouraged from using Less Wrong at all. This is not a desirable state of affairs, to say the least.

I was originally given my moderator powers on a rather ad-hoc basis, with someone awarding mod privileges to the ten users with the highest karma at the time. The original purpose for that appointment was just to delete spam. Nonetheless, since retributive downvoting has been a clear problem for the community, I asked the community for guidance on dealing with the issue. The rough consensus of the responses seemed to authorize me to deal with the problem as I deemed appropriate.

The fact that Eugine remained quiet about his guilt until directly confronted with the evidence, despite several public discussions of the issue, is indicative of him realizing that he was breaking prevailing social norms. Eugine's actions have worsened the atmosphere of this site, and that atmosphere will remain troubled for as long as he is allowed to remain here.

Therefore, I now announce that Eugine_Nier is permanently banned from posting on LessWrong. This decision is final and will not be changed in response to possible follow-up objections.

Unfortunately, it looks like while a ban prevents posting, it does not actually block a user from casting votes. I have asked jackk to look into the matter and find a way to actually stop the downvoting. Jack indicated earlier on that it would be technically straightforward to apply a negative karma modifier to Eugine's account, and wiping out Eugine's karma balance would prevent him from casting future downvotes. Whatever the easiest solution is, it will be applied as soon as possible.

EDIT 24 July 2014: Banned users are now prohibited from voting.

[moderator action] Eugine_Nier is now banned for mass downvote harassment
New Comment
369 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:
Some comments are truncated due to high volume. (⌘F to expand all)Change truncation settings
[-]Error700

Upvoted because moderation is hard and I get the impression it's more responsibility than you thought you were signing up for.

Especially since I never actually even signed up for it - I was just told one day that "hey, you're a mod now". :-)

That increases my trust in you.

[-]Error120

Ouch. Well, I'm not sure you can say that anymore. I don't envy you your new position as Garden Keeper.

1orthonormal
moderator : Garden Keeper :: Confessor : kiritsugu?

Huh. So I WASN'T paranoid.

That's actually a good feeling.

I don't feel even a little surprised - the one contrary hypothesis that seemed worth considering was someone personally close to, or weirdly obsessed with, Eugine Nier. But yes, this is good news.

Well, the last time I brought it up, there was quite a bit of controversy about whether I was imagining things... so I somehow feel vindicated. (But not TOO vindicated - it's important to note let those probabilities peg to 0 or 1)

[-]Error130

I didn't really approve of this when you posted it, but for what it's worth I just upvoted it as a correct prediction.

Thank you, Kaj_Sotala, for taking decisive action in the face of social awkwardness.

I'm sad to see Eugine_Nier go, but it sounds like a win overall.

[-]Shmi430

I seem to be the lone dissenter here, but I am unhappy about the ban. Not that it is unjustified, it definitely is. However, it does not address the main issue (until jackk fiddles with karma): preventing Eugine from mass downvoting. So this is mainly retribution, rather than remediation, which seems anti-rational to me, if emotionally satisfying, as one of the victims.

Imagine for a moment that Eugine did not engage in mass downvoting. He would be a valuable regular on this site. I recall dozens of insightful comments he made (and dozens of poor ones, of course, but who am I to point fingers), and I only stopped engaging him in the comments after his mass-downvoting habits were brought to light for the first time. So, I would rather see him exposed and dekarmified, but allowed to participate.

TL;DR: banning is a wrong decision, should have been exposed and stripped of the ability of downvote instead. Optionally, all his votes ever could have been reversed, unless it's hard.

EDIT: apparently not the lone dissenter, just the first to speak up.

This should be considered as a possibly better solution. People who can't be trusted with algorithmic control of visibility of others' posts may still have worthwhile posts of their own to contribute.

That said, I'm not sure I can wholeheartedly endorse it. Well-kept gardens die by pacifism. A person who has demonstrated active hostility toward others in the community perhaps shouldn't be regarded as a good-faith contributor. Kaj has construed this as a harassment problem rather than a bad data problem — it's not that Eugine was feeding erroneous data into a ranking algorithm whose output we care about; it's that he was (admittedly) trying to drive people off the site whom he didn't approve of.

[-]Shmi120

Kaj has construed this as a harassment problem

Right. And it seems like a non-central application of the harassment clause. As a result, he applied the measures standard for a harassment, which are not the best ones in this situation.

Part of the problem is that the cited policy is phrased as a nonbinding "deletion policy" (a discussion of cases when moderators might delete posts or comments) and not a "conduct policy" (discussing acceptable use of the site in general). The closest we seem to have to the latter is the "Site Etiquette and Social Norms" section of the FAQ, which does discuss some unacceptable uses of the voting mechanism but does not contemplate that someone might go so far as to use it to intentionally drive users off the site. That may not be a failure of imagination — it may be an avoidance of the "Don't stuff beans up your nose!" problem. Spelling out lots of ways to abuse the system provides a malicious or mischievous user with a list of things to do.

In any event, it's a bad idea to cooperate with a defectbot.

[-][anonymous]200

So this is mainly retribution, rather than remediation, which seems anti-rational to me

Retribution can serve as deterrence.

4Emile
Yep, suboptimal in many cases but often better than nothing.
9Shmi
Wrong comparison. I was not proposing doing nothing. Making the culprit's name public should have been the first step.
1JoshuaZ
In this case, many people had already expressed strong confidence that Eugine was a major source of mass downvoting- some we're quite certain of that and said so publicly. So it doesn't look like that matters.
-1VAuroch
It was public, several times over.
9Shmi
The suspicion was public, sure. There was no official confirmation and no indication that Eugene is the only one.
1EGarrett
He didn't just mass downvote. He purposefully attempted to remove other contributing members from the community. He also did not confess to it indicating both dishonesty and that he was aware that his actions were unacceptable. He also multi-accounted and still does and posts absolutely disgusting and logic-free racial comments and trolling (referring to black scientists to "dancing bears." You're welcome to demonstrate what's rational or constructive about that). You don't just undo those actions, you punish the person who takes part in them in order to deter the action occurring in the future. So that there can be civil discourse going forward. This is rational and a standard part of human social requirements.
0Richard_Kennaway
Never publicly, but I believe that (when he was posting as "Eugine Nier") a moderator did question him privately about it and he said that was his intention.
0EGarrett
Yes, he confessed to it when confronted. My understanding was that there were posts about mass downvoting and people asking who was doing it and if it was happening and he never admitted it or posted in them to confirm it, whereas if he thought it was okay there was no reason for him not to.

I'm also unhappy with him being banned from commenting but not downvoting. While I frequently found his comments obnoxious and annoying in their connotations, they definitely served a net positive on the site.

That said, his moderation practices clearly served a larger net negative, so if there are technical reasons why it's difficult to undo his moderation and ban him from moderating in the future, I suppose this is the best we can get.

3tsathoggua
I think the end goal is to stop him from down-voting as well as commenting as mentioned in the last sentence of the post.

I'm glad this was done, if only to send a signal to the community that something is being done, but you have a point that this is not an ideal solution and I hope a better one is implemented soon.

[-]Cyan130

EDIT: apparently not the lone dissenter, just the first to speak up.

Yup, I endorse this. (Pretty sure I've been one of Eugine Nier's targets at one time or another.) I am wary of silencing those who don't share my politics (even if they stink up the joint with links to Vox Day).

So, I would rather see him exposed and dekarmified, but allowed to participate.

If it were technically feasible, I'd say let him keep the karma score, just throttle or cut off his downvote button.

That said, I also endorse this:

Thanks, Kaj, you are a hero!!!

And this:

So far I think Kaj has handled this well, whether or not I agree with the specific punishment handed down. He's acted with both weight and care.

The ban made me uncomfortable, and the talk of Eugine as being "guilty" makes me even more uncomfortable. My take:

Perfect is the enemy of the good. If we expect massive downvoting to be a recurring problem, then maybe it would have been worth waiting until the development of non-voting accounts or dekarmification mechanisms. As an ad hoc solution to the problem du jour, banning a user is fine.

2tsathoggua
I guess the question is whether someone who took action by themselves to mass down vote for the express purpose of removing other users from the site would stop simply because his primary method was removed. If I were doing the down-voting, and was then de-karmified, it would be the next logical step to find another way around the system such that I could continue my actions without the use of karma.
3CCC
Hopefully, preventing him from commenting will mean that he begins to be less personally invested in the comment threads on the site, and thus more likely to spend his time doing other stuff instead of downvoting comments.

I seem to be the lone dissenter here, but I am unhappy about the ban.

I am also a lone dissenter who is unhappy about the ban.

Why not just ban him from further karma voting? Why ban him from posting? His posts and comments were good enough to get him plenty of karma which was required for him to even mass downvote other people in the first place.

2drethelin
As the topic seems to imply: they don't actually seem to have a way to keep him from using his karma.

They are quite capable of removing all his karma, or even setting it very negative, which would remove his ability to downvote. To the extent there are technical problems, they could give him a temporary ban while these are worked out.

Perma-ban is a deliberate choice by the moderator(s), not something they were forced into.

5Viliam_Bur
By the way, what are the consequences of low karma? Not being able to downvote, not being able to post articles... anything else?
9Emile
Below some negative karma threshold, there is a forced delay between comments (after posting a comment you have to wait a few minutes before you can post again).
8IlyaShpitser
Hi. I don't care about karma very much (and thus about downvoting). I am ok with my comments standing on merits not on numbers, and people using my name rather than a number as a quality shortcut if they really want one. I am perfectly happy to see that dude "not here," just based on the type of dude he is (not even based on his ideas). These types of dudes will ruin a community in a hurry, both by attracting more like themselves, and encouraging the more reasonable to leave. This is why I kept saying he needs to find another place on the internet to debate his politics. I have zero (0) problems with virtue ethical banning.
6someonewrongonthenet
As long as we're giving opinions on that: While many of his comments were interesting in an idiosyncratic, contrarian sort of way, I can't claim I've ever actually gained any insight from any of his comments. I agree that the ban won't help, though - what has happened is just a natural consequence of people upvoting "interesting" instead of "rationality-improving" (which, paradoxically seems to have created userbase shifts which cause things to ultimately be less interesting)
6NancyLebovitz
I've wondered about what those who liked about Nier's contributions liked about them. Was he doing decent work on the technical topics I don't follow?
[-]Dentin130

A decent fraction of his posts hard hitting and solid, usually saying something in a way that clearly and effectively got the point across. However, a much larger fraction of his posts were one-liner quips and thinly disguised political screeds. I ended up downvoting more than upvoting, but I did upvote.

7someonewrongonthenet
To be honest, I think people enjoyed his style more than his substance. The core lesswrong community (at least, back when I was more active) don't downvote to disagree. They upvote when something is thought provoking (as contrarian politics tends to be), they upvote novelty (again, contrarian politics) and they are more tolerant of critical tones than other parts of the net. So even though there wasn't much true insight and most people disagree with most of his opinions, it was interesting enough to read. I know I really enjoyed the influx of reactionaries for the first few months because it was a new and exciting thing...but then it kind of got tiresome - especially when reactionary voices started dominating completely unrelated conversations and influencing votes completely out of proportion to the number of members who actually held those views. Somehow, the reactionary users we had were also among the most active users, and naturally, they liked talking about politics. (Please note: While I did not explicitly say it, the above implies by connotation that Nier and his unethical practices are reflective of reactionaries in general. This is unintentional. What I AM saying is that the reason Neir was upvoted is the same reason that reactionaries were upvoted, and the things I disliked about Nier's writings is the same thing that I dislike about many but certainly not all of the reactionary user's writings - in short, compelling style and novelty but failure to use parsimony and substance, too much confidence in opinions reached via long chains of mostly inference - even when they wrote on non-political topics. What I'm NOT saying is that all reactionary users are behaving unethically in the manner of Neir.)
7Nornagest
His stuff was occasionally interestingly contrarian. I think it's useful to have a few people around with political/social opinions outside the usual LW space of lukewarm leftist to libertarian to technocrat, if only to help avoid groupthink. On the other hand, while it's nice to have someone to point out that the emperor is naked, it usually needs to be done in a way that's relatively hard to dismiss as a hateful diatribe.
3falenas108
Agreed. Though, getting any change to this site (minor or major) has proven to be extremely difficult. I approve of this step over nothing, though I do hope dekarmification does happen.

Thanks, Kaj, you are a hero!!!

Sorry for the pressure; I have already removed my post. Some clarifications: (1) It was not aimed only towards you personally. I know you hate some aspects of this job; and perhaps that is a good thing. But if you would hate it too much, then the logical solution would be that the Powers would appoint additional moderator, less averse against this kind of dirty work. (2) I was afraid that the actual result would be something less than ban and disclosure. A quiet solution behind the scenes would leave too many open questions, e.g. did we have only one mass downvoter, or more of them? The victims deserved an answer. Leaving the decision to community could lead to a popularity contest between political factions. (3) I believe than banning a user from logging in to LW should be very easy: just go to the database and change their password, that's all. If there is a chance to regenerate the lost password by e-mail, then remove their e-mail too. Or just change their password to "xyz", log in under their username, go to preferences, and click "Delete".

I hope this will lead to better trust and relationships among the LW users.

Thank you!

Though the biggest part of the credit belongs to jackk, for doing the technical work that allowed us to actually establish Eugine's guilt and for helping with the technical process of banning him.

6tut
We still don't know. But now there is a precedent for what to do about them, which might act as a deterrent.
1MugaSofer
Well, there were at least two. [Cite.] But that individual only targeted me, so I suppose every other mass-downvoter could have been Eugine.

I'd like to just add a quick note that I think is worth emphasizing for people reading this thread: there's an obvious temptation to read Eugine's actions as reflecting his political and philosophical viewpoints here, and it wouldn't even be that hard to think of post-hoc hypotheses connecting them. Please don't do this. I caught myself starting to do it, and it really isn't helpful. Events like this say more about individuals than their belief systems.

Connecting a specific political view point to this behavior is a post-hoc hypothesis.

But perhaps it was possible to predict in advance that if this happens, it will more likely be done by a person with strong political opinions (of any kind).

However, that lesson is already included in understanding that "politics is the mindkiller".

8VAuroch
His downvotes were certainly largely politically/philosophically motivated; I and several other people (off the top of my head the only other name I remember was daenerys) noted the downvote floods beginning specifically after debating "Culture War"-type topics; LGBT issues, feminism, racism, etc. I don't think that's what you intended to say, but it's an easy misreading, so clearing that up.
5JoshuaZ
Oh sure, (I was potentially downvoted for the same reason). The point isn't that they weren't politically motivated but rather that one shouldn't think the inclination to defect in this fashion is somehow more connected to a specific political viewpoint. Someone on the end opposite Eugine on these issues could easily be motivated to do the same thing.

For the sake of completeness:

other users whose downvoters I asked Jack to look at were brazil84, Desrtopa, NancyLebovitz, and JoshuaZ. A couple of them might have been the targets of mass downvoting (by other users) as well, but I did not feel that the pattern of downvote totals was sufficient to establish this beyond a reasonable doubt. They're encouraged to contact the moderators in case they seem to be targeted in the future, however.

Fair enough. The period when I was suspecting that I was being mass down-voted was relatively short-- possibly less than a year. I could have been wrong, or your methods might have been suited for detecting longer term patterns.

Thanks for dealing with Eugene.

His comments showed a strong tendency to oppose empathy-- offhand, I can't think of anyone else at LW who went as far that direction. I'm proposing that anti-empathy attitudes might correlate with willingness to hurt people.

I have mixed feelings about Eugine's banning, since he was a member with whom I experienced friction more than most, possibly any others outside a short time frame, and I often considered him to be aggressive or uncharitable in his general demeanor to other members, but on the other hand, I considered him to be an occasional source of valuable input.

Although it's probably an ignoble motivation, I think I'm also influenced by the fact that I still occasionally frequent other sites online where Eugine is likely to still frequent, and the prospect of hearing him, or more likely other reactionaries, complaining about how his banning is a symptom of Less Wrong shutting out reactionary voices, is liable to be obnoxious.

6brazil84
Thank you for letting me know about this. Also, even if you are not sure beyond a reasonable doubt, would you mind undoing the mass downvote? I realize it's a bit immature and shameful for me to care about it, but if it's not too much trouble I would prefer to have my karmassassination undone. It seems to me that the standard for banning someone should not necessarily be the same as the standard for undoing a mass downvote. It's not that big of a deal to me. (If it were, I would have set up a sock puppet account to boost my karma score.) But still, I care a little bit. Also, in another exchange, another poster (I believe it was Jack - hopefully not the same Jack) seized upon my negative karma ratio as a justification for not answering a question I asked. I realize that this was just a rationalization, but it's still annoying.

I don't think that I'd feel comfortable reversing someone's votes if I wasn't reasonably certain that they had actually been abusing the system.

2brazil84
Well what exactly is the source of your doubt? As I recall, somebody down-voted most or all of my posts in the space of a few hours. Do you agree that this happened?

So with several of the other users that Eugine had hit, the difference between his downvote total and that of the second-highest downvoter was quite drastic: in one case, there were 26 times as many downvotes from Eugine as from the second highest downvoter.

The pattern is different in your case: the top ten downvote balances against your account are 150, 74, 55, 36, 32, 31, 28, 20, 19, 17. (Eugine doesn't appear to have hit you, as he isn't included in this list.) It's plausible that the 150 person is a mass downvoter, and also that the 74 person is, given that the 74 person also had a suspiciously high downvote count towards another person. But at the same time, it also looks like there were a lot of people downvoting your comments. If I assume that most of the users in this list were "legitimate" downvoters, then I'm unsure of whether this data alone is sufficient to indicate exactly who the mass downvoter(s) was. The 150 person is the most likely culprit, but maybe it was several of the lower-ranking ones acting independently from each other, and the 150 one just happened to see a lot of your comments that he didn't naturally like? Whose downvotes should I have reverse... (read more)

Just based on brazil84's karma total, the 150 number seems unlikely to be more than 50% of brazil84's posts. It seems very much within the margin of statistical error that there would be a number that high, especially given the other users with large numbers of downvotes against brazil84. I think reversing the votes on this amount of evidence would be a pretty big stretch, fwiw (despite being strongly in favor of the earlier ban as well as reversing all of Eugine's votes).

2brazil84
When the mass downvoting took place, I had a lot fewer posts.
2brazil84
Does the system tell you when the downvotes were made?
0Kaj_Sotala
The report jackk gave me doesn't, at least. I don't know whether that information would be available aomewhere.
0brazil84
Followup: So will you take the actions I suggested? They seem pretty simple and easy and I can't think of why you wouldn't do them if your true reason is doubt. Thank you :)
5Kaj_Sotala
The main reason is that digging up the information about the specific downvotes would be more work for jackk and I'm not sure how burdened he is with the work that he's already doing. (Also more work for me.) But I'll ask him once he gets done with the current stuff he's doing for this whole thing.
0brazil84
Have you asked him? It's been a couple months now. TIA.
5Kaj_Sotala
No, I'm sorry. You could ask Viliam_Bur to do it.
-4brazil84
I did, but why not? I have a hypothesis but it's not very flattering to you.
8Kaj_Sotala
General ughy feelings around doing anything related to downvote investigations and an unwillingness to do anything that would cause me to spend more time doing them. Possible reasons for those ughy feelings include an aversion to doing anything confrontational (including punishing mass downvoters), a high uncertainty of what should be considered unacceptable behavior and low confidence in my ability to accurately determine what counts as karmassassination, and an unwillingness to bother people (including jackk) unless absolutely necessary. Not all of those reasons necessarily applied in your case, but it was close enough to trigger the emotional association.
4brazil84
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the persons who downvoted me a lot have significantly more popular views than those of Eugine_Nier.
2Kaj_Sotala
I don't actually remember who the people who downvoted you are. I'd have to look them up again.
-7brazil84
-1brazil84
Then what I would do is this: First, ask if there is a record of the time of the downvotes. If there were a large number over a short time period, you can be very confident that it's karmassassination. If that information isn't available, then just look at my posts which were downvoted by Senor 150 and compare it to my actual chronological posting history. If there is a long string of chronologically uninterrupted downvotes, you can be very confident that it's karmassassination.

What about the attack on MugaSofer from May 2013 (ticket on the issue tracker)?

I just logged back on after a brief absence from the site (a few days) to find I seem to have been genuinely karmassassinated. As far as I can tell, every comment I ever made has been downvoted, which was apparently enough to put me from 1200+ karma to -80

I missed that. I'll ask Jack to take a look.

A couple other cases, if they're worth looking at —

http://lesswrong.com/lw/9l7/whats_going_on_here/ (RobertLumley, January 2012)

http://lesswrong.com/lw/ir4/open_thread_september_30_october_6_2013/9uv4 (me, October 2013 et seq.)

9Kaj_Sotala
You have 1579 downvotes from Eugine. Robert looks to have a number of downvotes from several low-karma (20ish) users who, based on the style of their usernames and comments, look like they were all socks of a single person. Not sure what to do about that.

MugaSofer does have a lot of downvotes from Eugine, but Eugine doesn't seem to be the main culprit; there's another user with a downvote balance of 1625 votes against MugaSofer.

Given that I'm not aware of this other user having engaged in a systematic downvoting of anyone else, and given that MugaSofer expressed a preference for not having the mass downvoters banned, I will just issue that user a warning as well as let MugaSofer know who was downvoting him. MugaSofer may choose to make that information public or keep it between the two of them, as he wishes. I'll also ask if the downvotes of that person could be undone.

Thank you, Kaj. I really do appreciate your handling of this, if I haven't said that already; I know these things can be difficult.

I will just issue that user a warning as well as let MugaSofer know who was downvoting him. MugaSofer may choose to make that information public or keep it between the two of them, as he wishes.

I got your message, and I've received an apology and explanation from the person in question. I think I'll keep their identity quiet, although - in the interests of lessening wrongness - anyone who cares, if such a person exists, should PM me and we can talk about it.

(I think Eugine's downvotes are just that: a whole lot of downvotes. We've disagreed a few times, I'm not too surprised. Still, it's a shame to see him go.)