27 points

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I find it interesting that people do this. I'm going to use this as an opportunity to advocate doing the exact opposite: One thing I've found helps me listen to people more is when I'm having a disagreement with what someone else is saying over the course of a few posts, I go to their user page and find something that looks like it deserves an upvote and give it. This makes me much more willing to accept that the other person isn't being stupid, ignorant or otherwise just generally irrational on the point I disagree with them on.

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[META] Retributive downvoting: Why?

12 points

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Nov 27, 2012

Several people posted recently in a thread on women, mostly espousing feminist views - only to find that someone had declined to respond to their post, but instead browsed their history and downvoted every single comment or article they had ever posted.

I have two questions:

1. Why would you come to a site like this and pollute the karma system? How does it make you smarter? How does it make anyone else on the site smarter?

2. What would be a good technical workaround? In my mind, some system that detects mass-downvoting and flags a user for review would be preferable, but what should happen then? Should the system be more lenient to higher-karma posters? Who should perform the review process? What should be done with those whom the reviewer ascertains are abusing the karma system? I would prefer some kind of lesson that is more corrective than retributive - it seems to me that people who would perform this behavior are exactly the sort of people who need some of the lessons that this site provides. Any ideas?

12 points

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27 points

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I find it interesting that people do this. I'm going to use this as an opportunity to advocate doing the exact opposite: One thing I've found helps me listen to people more is when I'm having a disagreement with what someone else is saying over the course of a few posts, I go to their user page and find something that looks like it deserves an upvote and give it. This makes me much more willing to accept that the other person isn't being stupid, ignorant or otherwise just generally irrational on the point I disagree with them on.

27 points

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6 points

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I seldom answer you. Since almost always when I do, I am down-voted after that.

Not that I care much, but enough to not discuss a lot. No matter that you are interesting poster. The karma system is often quite bad.

6 points

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2 points

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I agree and wish to chime in that the current system absolutely stops me from stating what I think is reasonable and reasoned disagreement, and even stops me from asking questions. The stackoverflow.com site does NOT have this effect, at least not on me, and I think it is because downvotes cost the downvoter karma there (upvotes are free). So dowvnvotes are reserved for things that are really wrong, best deleted, and a post with a few upvotes will almost always rise to be net upvoted because haters get charged karma to counter upvotes.

2 points

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26 points

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Because LW is a multiplayer video game where you are winning when your team is getting more karma relative to the enemy player team. Whenever a video game is misdesigned to allow uninteresting grinding to contribute to winning, some people will do lots of uninteresting grinding to win.

26 points

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22 points

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An alternative would be to recognize that an upvote and a downvote are more orthogonal than opposite. A post or comment with 20 upvotes and 30 downvotes is clearly a very different post than one with 0 upvotes and 10 downvotes. A user with 2000 upvotes and 1500 downvotes is clearly a very different user than a user with 25 upvotes and 500 downvotes. If lesswrong simply reported upvote and downvote tallys side by side rather than netting them, a lot more information about posts, comments, and users would be available to readers. The current system is incapable of distinguishing between morons, trolls, intelligent newbies, and valuable and intelligent gadflies. Reporting positive and negative votes separately would help a lot.

22 points

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13 points

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This has only been a feature request since the forum started.

13 points

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4 points

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This suggestion usually gets a lot of support, is there a reason why it hasn't been implemented?

4 points

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4 points

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There's even an issue for it.

4 points

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radical_negative_one

20 points

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I want to point out that it is possible that some of these downvotes* could be honest assessments of a comment history. If a user notices you by reading one comment, that user might become interested in other comments you've written, and if this person didn't like one comment, he may also dislike other comments in which you express similar ideas.

* Which were not from me, because i have not read the conversation you linked to.

I say this because i realize that i have (arguably) done it before. I noticed a comment from one particular user which deserved to be downvoted. Then i read all the related conversations and downvoted the other comments in which that user repeated more or less the same thing. Then, i began reading earlier conversations in which that user had participated, and found that many of this user's comments were bad for similar reasons, but i did upvote about 10% of them that were good.

Overall, the user who had been downvoted saw a sudden karma drop within several minutes; they specifically made an accusation of retributive downvoting.

Long story short: on at least one occasion, a user who complained about mass downvoting was actually experiencing a rapid series of honest downvotes.

20 points

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10 points

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I would argue that when you do this, you owe it to the person you are downvoting to explain WHY you believe they are systematically wrong. A series of downvotes + one helpful comment is far preferable to a simple series of downvotes, even if it costs you karma to do so. As an example:

my response to an apparent troll comment on Brain Preservation

See, just smacking someone without telling them WHY you're smacking them leaves them to all sorts of conjecture as to what happened - if whomever had downvoted 30+ of my posts had left a single comment explaining why, I could have learned from it. As it is, I have no evidence to distinguish retribution from legitimate correction, and no data with which to correct myself even if it IS an attempt at legitimate correction.

Actually, thinking on this further, a series of downvotes plus an immediate comment explaining why is EXACTLY the right behavior - the sudden plunge in karma will get the user's attention, which they can then direct to the reply - the combination of mild social shaming, "score penalizing" and corrective explanation is a quite powerful way to drive home a lesson.

10 points

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Kingoftheinternet

10 points

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Someone spending their precious time going through someone's history to decrease their near-meaningless number as much as they possibly can is already losing. I hear about this happening so infrequently, and it's so totally inconsequential, that I don't think it merits thinking up/making changes to anything.

10 points

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17 points

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All protestations to the opposite aside, I very much doubt that karma is generally viewed as "near-meaningless". It is the main avenue of feedback and affirmation in what is often viewed as a rather intimidating environment (by newcomers especially).

As for those spending time with retributive downvoting, how do you know that they do not gain more satisfaction out of that than, say, watching the new BSG webisodes, using their "precious time". From Will_Newsome to Wei_Dai, I've seen even some veterans explain the importance they ascribe to karma. Would you laugh it off if your karma score were reduced to 0 by one guy with a few sockpuppets?

It's the only quantifiable metric in this social game. There even is a "top contributers" meta game on the sidebar. Of course all that makes it en vogue to pretend not to care, similar to wealthy people acting as if money weren't worth talking about.

If you truly don't care, good for you.

17 points

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Kingoftheinternet

8 points

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On individual comments and posts, the karma system is valuable for telling you if you're being stupid or not, and I appreciate it for that. The total karma score is (how long you've been on LW) (how often you post) (how much people like what you say); it says something like "how much you contribute to this site", which I find much less interesting, and I personally don't care if it's accurate.

I am, in fact, accusing people who downvote all posts by one person as using their time incorrectly; there are so many other things they could be doing that would make them happier and better-off, including nothing at all, that there's not much excuse for going through with it.

If my karma were reduced to zero, I would continue carrying on as I do now, commenting on this and that, and my karma would from then on be a positive number I don't pay attention to. A phlegmatic disposition has its advantages.

8 points

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7 points

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The problem is that it isn't meaningless. I was in the middle of a rather interesting ethical discussion, and many of my posts that I had just made went from 0 to -1, potentially dropping off of the radar of other readers. All it takes is two users colluding (or one user with an additional sock account) to effectively shut down someone else's entire voice.

If a post goes from 4 to 3, that isn't a big deal, but if it drops below the minimum display threshold before anyone gets a chance to read it, the entire flow of conversation gets disrupted.

7 points

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4 points

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I've been retributively downvoted by one or two people over the past week and have lost about 110 karma. (Though I don't think I posted in the thread linked by the OP.) I agree that we need a system in place to correct and/or prevent abuses of the karma system.

At bare minimum, I think that LW should have a private log of users' up-vote/down-vote history accessible by the moderators. If someone complains of karma-assassination or the like, moderators could review the log and take appropriate action.

4 points

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2 points

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I'd support having such a log for administrators, although I find it likely there already exists such a thing as LW does keep track of every upvote and downvote of every user on every post/comment they up/downvote.

I would only want them to take "appropriate action" if appropriate means announcing clearly any new policy and preferably automating that policy. I do not think an unannounced one off "you are a bad person because you downvoted whoever 7 times thursday so we are X'ing you" without putting some automation and/or warning in place is appropriate.

2 points

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3 points

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It is also very interesting to notice that the subject is charged enough to provoke this kind of behaviour. I don't think it has ever happened on a discussion about a technical fine point of some decision theory.

This evidence increase the probability I have on the hypothesis: "LW crowd has totally failed in raising his own sanity waterline, on average. There are people who undoubtably increased their own, but they are more than compensated by people who get even more irrational on a rationality forum."

3 points

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5 points

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Do you have evidence that favors that hypothesis relative to "The general improvement in the sanity waterline at LW is sufficiently small and poorly distributed as to make no difference among a large fraction of users when it comes to emotionally charged topics, even though both the mean and median user has raised their sanity level."?

5 points

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3 points

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Should have been a comment in the Open Thread.

3 points

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11 points

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Given the volume of responsive comments, I'm not sure why you think this is true.

11 points

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