I notice that one thing all of these people (including you) have in common is that you have all said progressive things about gender, whereas Eugine Nier says reactionary things regarding gender.
It’s probably worth talking to these people and seeing if the timing works out the same, but it does seem likely that the downvoting is all caused by the same person, and thus would have similar motives and MO with the downvoting.
It’s probably worth talking to these people and seeing if the timing works out the same, but it does seem likely that the downvoting is all caused by the same person, and thus would have similar motives and MO with the downvoting.
Personally, I am pretty certain that is gender issues that cause my karma stalking. It’s the only topic I write on that gets any significant number of downvotes. Also, due to timing, my best guess (though I’m not highly confident) is that the triggering event was my post in the mistakes thread admitting to staying married longer than I should have due to not being confident in my independence. I knew when writing it that some of the MRA assholes on here would take offense at it.
Also, whoever is doing it has pretty effectively made me unlikely to post a lot on here. (I still occassionally browse, and obviously I’m writing this, so it’s not like I’ve completely quit or anything.) It’s annoying to deal with (and saying “you should just stop caring” is about as effective of advice as telling people to “be more confident”). Considering that half my facebook feed is rationalist/LWers anyways, it’s higher reward to just post my thoughts there and not have to deal with the LW baggage, but still get the interesting conversation with the people I want to talk with anyways.
Just figured I should say something because if evaporative cooling is happening in general (and it isn’t just me), it could be hidden because the people who leave aren’t saying anything.
(ETA: I actually have not lost a LOT of karma from this, so it’s not the amount/number. It’s just the fact that it’s consistent, and it’s everything I post)
That’s actually pretty frightening, since that indicates that this sort of thing has a real impact on the tenor and participation in the community. This strongly makes me update to thinking that we should have admins actually look at logs for this sort of thing.
I post here must less often that I used to. Reasons: 1) Not good use of my time 2) This site reinforces modes of thought that are not useful for me—I love philosophy, especially moral philosophy, but that’s not what I do for a living and I shouldn’t allow my mental attention to be diverted. 3) Highly predictable downvotes on the topics I want to discuss—with a perception that one side gets more downvotes than the other for the purpose of evaporative cooling away of the one side. Of course, I think my side gets the short end of that stick (and I would, because politics and personal identity are the mind-killer).
Objectively, 1 & 2 are more important reasons, but subjectively, 3 feels more causally relevant to my withdrawal.
Huh. This just convinced me that I should be quick to upvote things if they were even a little helpful, so that no one who isn’t posting really counterproductive stuff gets that negative hit. Because you’re probably not on my facebook feed, and I probably don’t already agree with all the things you’re going to say, so I want you and people like you to keep posting on lesswrong.
I have what seems to me like quite good evidence that there is at least one LW user who engages in what one might call intimidatory downvoting of users who express “progressive” views on gender.
I consider this a very, very bad thing for LW.
I am not aware of any reason to think that there is intimidatory downvoting based on any other issue. (Of course there might be some that I haven’t noticed.)
Do you mean by “intimidatory downvoting” something substantively different from the thing (or things) others have referred to as “retributative downvoting”, “block-downvoting”, “karmassassination”, etc., in this and related threads? If so, can you clarify what you mean?
Intimidatory downvoting: Downvoting whose purpose is to discourage people from expressing certain kinds of views on LW by the threat of massive karma loss. (In particular, the threat of much more than they would lose just from having their comments expressing those views downvoted.)
Retributive downvoting: Downvoting whose purpose is to get back at someone who has annoyed or upset you, or whom you don’t like for some other reason.
Block-downvoting: Largely-indiscriminative downvoting of a user’s comments, whatever the reason. (I might also use the term to describe downvoting everything in some conversation, though I might not because it isn’t standard terminology.)
Karmassassination: Large-scale downvoting whose aim is to reduce a particular user’s karma score, for whatever reason (could be retributive, could be because you’ve nothing personal against them but think, after careful reflection, that it would be best for LW if they left, etc.).
I dislike intimidatory downvoting because (1) it’s unreasonably unpleasant for the victim, (2) it seems like an attempt to exercise more power over what views are expressed on LW than the karma system is really meant to enable, (3) it distorts the per-comment information karma scores are meant to provide (expressed not only in the scores themselves but in thread ordering), and (4) because most users will avoid it on account of #1 and #3, it gives extra influence to those who care less about the LW community as a whole and extra importance to opinions on topics that push those people’s buttons.
[EDITED to add: It occurs to me that it’s possible that when not explicitly prompted to distinguish carefully between these terms, I may actually use them less carefully. I don’t think so, though. I don’t think I’ve actually used, as opposed to quoting others’ use of, the term “karmassassination”, which I find ugly. Though I suppose maybe an ugly thing deserves an ugly word. I’ve also used the term “mass-downvoting”, meaning much the same as “block-downvoting”.]
Ideological difference is particularly pervasive in topics that are related to social sciences. I get the feeling from reading your post that you’re angry. Angry not about the downvoting but more about the ideological differences.
You can count me as another member who has both been block downvoted, and suspects Eugine Nier as the most likely candidate based on my patterns of downvotes received when I participate in conversations or debates with him.
I’m skeptical that this can be boiled down to some particular issue like that.
It seems far more likely to me that the block downvoter is simply doing it out of a sense of resentment regarding the individuals he/she is downvoting. I say this because he/she seems to downvote posts rapidly and without reading them, which suggests he/she is targeting individuals rather than specific viewpoints. In particular, most of the downvoted comments do not seem to have anything to do with gender.
It’s possible that you’re right and Eugine (or whoever is doing the block downvoting) is on a personal mission to destroy progressive views on this website. However, this is a very specific accusation and I’d like to see more evidence supporting it.
Reading through your own posts, you have focused far more on gender than either of the three you mention, and this suggests to me that you have to reconsider your own biases. Sorry, but I feel I have to say this.
It is evidence of an ideological or even a personality difference, even if it is not the specific issue.
Reading through your own posts, you have focused far more on gender than either of the three you mention, and this suggests to me that you have to reconsider your own biases. Sorry, but I feel I have to say this.
I do not consider this pattern to be anything but very weak evidence. I’m surprised that you noticed this though—I looked through my comments, and I did not see very many comments about gender going back to May.
It is evidence of an ideological or even a personality difference
If by ‘it’ you mean the comments themselves, I agree. Someone’s comments can be taken as evidence of ideological difference. As you said, though, it’s probably not the specific issue.
My block downvoting with a similar pattern started after I made some comments regarding polyamory (but also after the larger thread I made where I ranted that we shouldn’t call ourselves a cult) so that kind of fits the pattern.
Edit: Also mine, ialdabaoth and fubarobfusco’s comments in this thread seem to have been downvoted by one person at around the same time while not all others were.
Well, you complained on October 25th about block downvotes starting over the “last couple of days”.
And a few days before, you made these comments, the one linked to in particular strikes me as the sort of thing that might aggravate someone into block downvoting you.
Eugene gets accused of block downvoting, based on the incontrovertible evidence of multiple posters not being terribly fond of him.
You judge that he is not only guilty of block downvoting, but specifically targeting feminists because of his reactionary politics.
shminux has been block downvoted, and once made a reply to a comment espousing a neoreactionary view of gender.
Therefore, as the author of said comment, the implication is that I must have waited for “a few days” and then systematically downvoted all (or just most?) of shminux’s comments. Because the comment did something to “aggregate” (aggravate?) me or maybe just out of solidarity with other reactionaries (because I guess that’s what we do now?).
Now I did downvote that specific comment, because it was entirely content-free, but as a rule I try not to downvote people responding to me. And the idea of using mass downvoting to harass people I dislike is the kind of passive-aggressive thought policing nonsense which made me stop being a progressive in the first place (seriously, using anonymous voting to shut someone up by making them seem unpopular… how is that supposed to be right wing?).
As far as I’m concerned, the admins are free to look at my karma logs as much as they want, and I’ve supported anti-karma-assassin software for a while. But politically motivated mud-slinging and invocation of the mods to remove people you disagree with is absolutely beyond the pale. We are supposed to be better than that here.
Eugene gets accused of block downvoting, based on the incontrovertible evidence of multiple posters not being terribly fond of him.
This is not at all a reasonable summary of what was going on there. A specific reason for focusing on Eugine was given, and Eugine’s continued lack of comment at this point is not helping matters. (That’s unfortunate because I’d much rather believer that he isn’t doing this.)
You judge that he is not only guilty of block downvoting, but specifically targeting feminists because of his reactionary politics.
Not necessarily feminists per se, but the fact is that almost all the people who have experienced mass downvoting are people who have argued against traditional sex or gender roles.
shminux has been block downvoted, and once made a reply to a comment espousing a neoreactionary view of gender.
Shminux made a (somewhat insulting, not necessarily productive) comment, and the downvoting experience started off shortly thereafter.
view of gender.
Therefore, as the author of said comment, the implication is that I must have waited for “a few days” and then systematically downvoted all (or just most?) of shminux’s comments. Because the comment did something to “aggregate” (aggravate?) me or maybe just out of solidarity with other reactionaries (because I guess that’s what we do now?).
Adele_L said nothing at all about you being involved in any way with any block downvoting behavior.
And the idea of using mass downvoting to harass people I dislike is the kind of passive-aggressive thought policing nonsense which made me stop being a progressive in the first place (seriously, using anonymous voting to shut someone up by making them seem unpopular… how is that supposed to be right wing?).
Let me tentatively suggest that there’s nothing intrinsically “right-wing” or “left-wing” about such behavior. It may be manifesting itself in a specific political framework, but very likely is more a function of the individual or individuals engaging in the behavior than saying much about their political alignment.
But politically motivated mud-slinging and invocation of the mods to remove people you disagree with is absolutely beyond the pale.
The primary invoking of the mods I’ve seen here has been to actually take a look and see who the downvotes are coming from. That’s a pretty distinct situation.
I saw what looked like a small-scale block-downvote, and I’m mostly quite reactionary on gender (and my most recent likely-controversial statements have been a very reactionary view on polyamory).
I am willing to sacrifice large amounts of karma to test this as someone who cares deeply about both the quality of the LW community and about gender issues, and who experiences significant intangible benefit from cleverly cracking someone’s utility function. Should I?
I agree, and this crossed my mind, but there seems no other way to coordinate properly, and I have, in fact, take a further sacrifice in possibly inspiring any number of other people indistinguishable from normal gender-progressives to act in accordance with this plan, silently, at the possible expense of this effectiveness.
I am willing to sacrifice large amounts of karma to test this
Uhm.. you don’t have large amounts of karma (I have lost more karma in the block down votes I’m receiving than your total)and as people said announcing your intentions seems counter-productive.
An amount which is large to me, but thanks for trivializing my willingness to sacrifice.
While I’m genuinely not sure whether that’s tongue-in-cheek or not, either way I’d rather go to Reddit to witness such tragicomedies and not see this community, too, devolve into adolescent internet-points-bickering. I admit that I dig the entertainment value (and the bait is strong), but as the proverb goes, let’s keep this place free from apotheosing imaginary constructs. Instead, right this way is a better place to bravely martyr yourself for the public good.
It is my estimation that none of the people around here whose approval is typically sought will actually judge you by your karma score in any significant sense, as opposed to by being impressed with the content of your comments, or your posts in Main. There are plenty of low karma commenters whose contributions I respect, and some high karma commenters whose I don’t. YMMV.
Some other people who have been complaining about block downvoting are daenerys, NancyLebovitz and shminux.
I notice that one thing all of these people (including you) have in common is that you have all said progressive things about gender, whereas Eugine Nier says reactionary things regarding gender.
It’s probably worth talking to these people and seeing if the timing works out the same, but it does seem likely that the downvoting is all caused by the same person, and thus would have similar motives and MO with the downvoting.
Personally, I am pretty certain that is gender issues that cause my karma stalking. It’s the only topic I write on that gets any significant number of downvotes. Also, due to timing, my best guess (though I’m not highly confident) is that the triggering event was my post in the mistakes thread admitting to staying married longer than I should have due to not being confident in my independence. I knew when writing it that some of the MRA assholes on here would take offense at it.
Also, whoever is doing it has pretty effectively made me unlikely to post a lot on here. (I still occassionally browse, and obviously I’m writing this, so it’s not like I’ve completely quit or anything.) It’s annoying to deal with (and saying “you should just stop caring” is about as effective of advice as telling people to “be more confident”). Considering that half my facebook feed is rationalist/LWers anyways, it’s higher reward to just post my thoughts there and not have to deal with the LW baggage, but still get the interesting conversation with the people I want to talk with anyways.
Just figured I should say something because if evaporative cooling is happening in general (and it isn’t just me), it could be hidden because the people who leave aren’t saying anything.
(ETA: I actually have not lost a LOT of karma from this, so it’s not the amount/number. It’s just the fact that it’s consistent, and it’s everything I post)
That’s actually pretty frightening, since that indicates that this sort of thing has a real impact on the tenor and participation in the community. This strongly makes me update to thinking that we should have admins actually look at logs for this sort of thing.
Data Point (of questionable value):
I post here must less often that I used to. Reasons:
1) Not good use of my time
2) This site reinforces modes of thought that are not useful for me—I love philosophy, especially moral philosophy, but that’s not what I do for a living and I shouldn’t allow my mental attention to be diverted.
3) Highly predictable downvotes on the topics I want to discuss—with a perception that one side gets more downvotes than the other for the purpose of evaporative cooling away of the one side. Of course, I think my side gets the short end of that stick (and I would, because politics and personal identity are the mind-killer).
Objectively, 1 & 2 are more important reasons, but subjectively, 3 feels more causally relevant to my withdrawal.
It seems conceptually easy to create a script to return sets of votes that satisfy the following conditions:
1) Occur fairly close together, time-wise 2) Are made by the same user 3) Are down-votes 4) Decrease the post’s score by ⇒ a fraction
This would likely make it easier for mods to review things like this. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time+skills to do this.
Huh. This just convinced me that I should be quick to upvote things if they were even a little helpful, so that no one who isn’t posting really counterproductive stuff gets that negative hit. Because you’re probably not on my facebook feed, and I probably don’t already agree with all the things you’re going to say, so I want you and people like you to keep posting on lesswrong.
I have what seems to me like quite good evidence that there is at least one LW user who engages in what one might call intimidatory downvoting of users who express “progressive” views on gender.
I consider this a very, very bad thing for LW.
I am not aware of any reason to think that there is intimidatory downvoting based on any other issue. (Of course there might be some that I haven’t noticed.)
Do you mean by “intimidatory downvoting” something substantively different from the thing (or things) others have referred to as “retributative downvoting”, “block-downvoting”, “karmassassination”, etc., in this and related threads? If so, can you clarify what you mean?
I’ll explain how I use all those terms.
Intimidatory downvoting: Downvoting whose purpose is to discourage people from expressing certain kinds of views on LW by the threat of massive karma loss. (In particular, the threat of much more than they would lose just from having their comments expressing those views downvoted.)
Retributive downvoting: Downvoting whose purpose is to get back at someone who has annoyed or upset you, or whom you don’t like for some other reason.
Block-downvoting: Largely-indiscriminative downvoting of a user’s comments, whatever the reason. (I might also use the term to describe downvoting everything in some conversation, though I might not because it isn’t standard terminology.)
Karmassassination: Large-scale downvoting whose aim is to reduce a particular user’s karma score, for whatever reason (could be retributive, could be because you’ve nothing personal against them but think, after careful reflection, that it would be best for LW if they left, etc.).
I dislike intimidatory downvoting because (1) it’s unreasonably unpleasant for the victim, (2) it seems like an attempt to exercise more power over what views are expressed on LW than the karma system is really meant to enable, (3) it distorts the per-comment information karma scores are meant to provide (expressed not only in the scores themselves but in thread ordering), and (4) because most users will avoid it on account of #1 and #3, it gives extra influence to those who care less about the LW community as a whole and extra importance to opinions on topics that push those people’s buttons.
[EDITED to add: It occurs to me that it’s possible that when not explicitly prompted to distinguish carefully between these terms, I may actually use them less carefully. I don’t think so, though. I don’t think I’ve actually used, as opposed to quoting others’ use of, the term “karmassassination”, which I find ugly. Though I suppose maybe an ugly thing deserves an ugly word. I’ve also used the term “mass-downvoting”, meaning much the same as “block-downvoting”.]
(nods) Makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.
Ideological difference is particularly pervasive in topics that are related to social sciences. I get the feeling from reading your post that you’re angry. Angry not about the downvoting but more about the ideological differences.
You can count me as another member who has both been block downvoted, and suspects Eugine Nier as the most likely candidate based on my patterns of downvotes received when I participate in conversations or debates with him.
Looking at his comment history, it seems he focuses on US politics and gender issues a disproportionate amount. Politics is the mindkiller?
I’m skeptical that this can be boiled down to some particular issue like that.
It seems far more likely to me that the block downvoter is simply doing it out of a sense of resentment regarding the individuals he/she is downvoting. I say this because he/she seems to downvote posts rapidly and without reading them, which suggests he/she is targeting individuals rather than specific viewpoints. In particular, most of the downvoted comments do not seem to have anything to do with gender.
It’s possible that you’re right and Eugine (or whoever is doing the block downvoting) is on a personal mission to destroy progressive views on this website. However, this is a very specific accusation and I’d like to see more evidence supporting it.
Reading through your own posts, you have focused far more on gender than either of the three you mention, and this suggests to me that you have to reconsider your own biases. Sorry, but I feel I have to say this.
It is evidence of an ideological or even a personality difference, even if it is not the specific issue.
I do not consider this pattern to be anything but very weak evidence. I’m surprised that you noticed this though—I looked through my comments, and I did not see very many comments about gender going back to May.
If by ‘it’ you mean the comments themselves, I agree. Someone’s comments can be taken as evidence of ideological difference. As you said, though, it’s probably not the specific issue.
My block downvoting with a similar pattern started after I made some comments regarding polyamory (but also after the larger thread I made where I ranted that we shouldn’t call ourselves a cult) so that kind of fits the pattern.
Edit: Also mine, ialdabaoth and fubarobfusco’s comments in this thread seem to have been downvoted by one person at around the same time while not all others were.
I would be quite surprised if whoever karma-stalked me was pissed off at anything I said about gender issues.
Well, you complained on October 25th about block downvotes starting over the “last couple of days”.
And a few days before, you made these comments, the one linked to in particular strikes me as the sort of thing that might aggravate someone into block downvoting you.
Huh, you might be right. My point was less about gender issues and more about the symptoms of motivated cognition, but I see your point.
It’s interesting how this is developing;
Eugene gets accused of block downvoting, based on the incontrovertible evidence of multiple posters not being terribly fond of him.
You judge that he is not only guilty of block downvoting, but specifically targeting feminists because of his reactionary politics.
shminux has been block downvoted, and once made a reply to a comment espousing a neoreactionary view of gender.
Therefore, as the author of said comment, the implication is that I must have waited for “a few days” and then systematically downvoted all (or just most?) of shminux’s comments. Because the comment did something to “aggregate” (aggravate?) me or maybe just out of solidarity with other reactionaries (because I guess that’s what we do now?).
Now I did downvote that specific comment, because it was entirely content-free, but as a rule I try not to downvote people responding to me. And the idea of using mass downvoting to harass people I dislike is the kind of passive-aggressive thought policing nonsense which made me stop being a progressive in the first place (seriously, using anonymous voting to shut someone up by making them seem unpopular… how is that supposed to be right wing?).
As far as I’m concerned, the admins are free to look at my karma logs as much as they want, and I’ve supported anti-karma-assassin software for a while. But politically motivated mud-slinging and invocation of the mods to remove people you disagree with is absolutely beyond the pale. We are supposed to be better than that here.
This is not at all a reasonable summary of what was going on there. A specific reason for focusing on Eugine was given, and Eugine’s continued lack of comment at this point is not helping matters. (That’s unfortunate because I’d much rather believer that he isn’t doing this.)
Not necessarily feminists per se, but the fact is that almost all the people who have experienced mass downvoting are people who have argued against traditional sex or gender roles.
Shminux made a (somewhat insulting, not necessarily productive) comment, and the downvoting experience started off shortly thereafter.
Adele_L said nothing at all about you being involved in any way with any block downvoting behavior.
Let me tentatively suggest that there’s nothing intrinsically “right-wing” or “left-wing” about such behavior. It may be manifesting itself in a specific political framework, but very likely is more a function of the individual or individuals engaging in the behavior than saying much about their political alignment.
The primary invoking of the mods I’ve seen here has been to actually take a look and see who the downvotes are coming from. That’s a pretty distinct situation.
I have never suspected you, and I am not accusing you of anything. Comments can be aggravating to people who are not the direct recipient.
I saw what looked like a small-scale block-downvote, and I’m mostly quite reactionary on gender (and my most recent likely-controversial statements have been a very reactionary view on polyamory).
I am willing to sacrifice large amounts of karma to test this as someone who cares deeply about both the quality of the LW community and about gender issues, and who experiences significant intangible benefit from cleverly cracking someone’s utility function. Should I?
Publicly admitting this plan is likely to reduce its effectiveness.
I agree, and this crossed my mind, but there seems no other way to coordinate properly, and I have, in fact, take a further sacrifice in possibly inspiring any number of other people indistinguishable from normal gender-progressives to act in accordance with this plan, silently, at the possible expense of this effectiveness.
I am not quite clear as to how will you test this. Are you saying you will just troll? That doesn’t look likely to increase the quality of the forum.
Uhm.. you don’t have large amounts of karma (I have lost more karma in the block down votes I’m receiving than your total)and as people said announcing your intentions seems counter-productive.
An amount which is large to me, but thanks for trivializing my willingness to sacrifice.
While I’m genuinely not sure whether that’s tongue-in-cheek or not, either way I’d rather go to Reddit to witness such tragicomedies and not see this community, too, devolve into adolescent internet-points-bickering. I admit that I dig the entertainment value (and the bait is strong), but as the proverb goes, let’s keep this place free from apotheosing imaginary constructs. Instead, right this way is a better place to bravely martyr yourself for the public good.
It is my estimation that none of the people around here whose approval is typically sought will actually judge you by your karma score in any significant sense, as opposed to by being impressed with the content of your comments, or your posts in Main. There are plenty of low karma commenters whose contributions I respect, and some high karma commenters whose I don’t. YMMV.