11 points

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[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.

See comment in full context

Self-serving meta: Whoever keeps block-downvoting me, is there some way to negotiate peace?

16 points

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Nov 16, 2013

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.

16 points

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16 points

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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.)

16 points

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18 points

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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.

18 points

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11 points

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[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.

11 points

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11 points

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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?

11 points

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9 points

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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.

9 points

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8 points

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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.

8 points

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7 points

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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.

7 points

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6 points

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Eugine's karma ratio for the past month has dropped from 75 % to 52 % after you named him. What do you think of that?

6 points

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12 points

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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-cheek suggestion that I am TOTALLY NOT ADVOCATING: Destroying Eleizer's karma instead would send a much tighter message).

Finally, if you're doing ANY of this for my sake, I would humbly request that when you downvote someone, you have a legitimate reason for downvoting that post beyond merely the name of the poster, AND that you either reply or send them a PM explaining why you downvoted them, and what they could do to improve their post quality. It doesn't have to be on every post, but I really think that if we start helping each other improve instead of simply punishing failure, this site's general social atmosphere could be greatly improved.

12 points

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