Most likely: Someone has taken exception to something you wrote and decided to go back and downvote a load of your old comments. It’s a thing that happens. Victims complain about it from time to time. Eliezer says he’s asked someone to look at the LW database for evidence of mass-downvoting but they haven’t found anything useful; make of that what you will.
There are some grounds for thinking that people who make comments supporting (in rough terms) feminist views, and more generally but also more weakly “non-Reactionary” views, are particularly likely to attract the attention of mass-downvoters. (One might respond to this by avoiding such comments, or by defiantly making more of them.)
Less likely but not impossible: Someone has disliked something you wrote, gone back through your comment history, independently assessed the quality of each comment, and happens to have found ~25 comments that they think deserved downvoting on their own (de)merits.
[EDITED to add: Hello, downvoters! If you think something is bad about the above, please do let me know what. Otherwise, my working hypothesis is that the downvotes on this comment come from mass-downvoters who don’t like being talked about. and I’ll adopt my usual heuristic of responding to what look like mass-downvotes by posting more.]
There are some grounds for thinking that people who make comments supporting (in rough terms) feminist views, and more generally but also more weakly “non-Reactionary” views, are particularly likely to attract the attention of mass-downvoters.
This could make it sound like LessWrong is antifeminist. I’ll just clarify that this is (very?) false. It’s just that the people doing karmassassination are possibly antifeminist.
For the avoidance of doubt: Yes, I agree. LW as such has no position on these issues; such evidence as I’ve seen suggests that the median LW participant is favourably disposed towards feminism[1] and politically liberal; one could easily get a different impression from reading LW, a fact with a variety of possible explanations.
[1] The definition of “feminist” and the question of who is entitled to call themselves feminist are subject to some controversy, hence my cautious wording.
Thank you. I’m still confused, though, because I started out at 0 karma for the month, making the changes in the numbers non-equal. I’m now on {16, 2}, which is consistent with {12,-2}, though.
Remember that the change in karma-for-the-month is the sum of two things: changes now and changes a month ago. So it can jump down even when nothing interesting just happened, if you got a bunch of upvotes 30 days ago.
But the big jump was in karma, not karma-for-the-month. My karma-for-the-month went down by two and my karma went down by 25. I’m now on {20, 5}, which is inconsistent with the {12, −2} and {16, 2} from earlier today.
Karma-for-the-month is karma on your last month’s postings, not the last month’s votes on all your postings. If your total plummets while KftM hardly changes, it means a bunch of old posts got downvoted.
Most likely: Someone has taken exception to something you wrote and decided to go back and downvote a load of your old comments. It’s a thing that happens. Victims complain about it from time to time. Eliezer says he’s asked someone to look at the LW database for evidence of mass-downvoting but they haven’t found anything useful; make of that what you will.
There are some grounds for thinking that people who make comments supporting (in rough terms) feminist views, and more generally but also more weakly “non-Reactionary” views, are particularly likely to attract the attention of mass-downvoters. (One might respond to this by avoiding such comments, or by defiantly making more of them.)
Less likely but not impossible: Someone has disliked something you wrote, gone back through your comment history, independently assessed the quality of each comment, and happens to have found ~25 comments that they think deserved downvoting on their own (de)merits.
[EDITED to add: Hello, downvoters! If you think something is bad about the above, please do let me know what. Otherwise, my working hypothesis is that the downvotes on this comment come from mass-downvoters who don’t like being talked about. and I’ll adopt my usual heuristic of responding to what look like mass-downvotes by posting more.]
This could make it sound like LessWrong is antifeminist. I’ll just clarify that this is (very?) false. It’s just that the people doing karmassassination are possibly antifeminist.
For the avoidance of doubt: Yes, I agree. LW as such has no position on these issues; such evidence as I’ve seen suggests that the median LW participant is favourably disposed towards feminism[1] and politically liberal; one could easily get a different impression from reading LW, a fact with a variety of possible explanations.
[1] The definition of “feminist” and the question of who is entitled to call themselves feminist are subject to some controversy, hence my cautious wording.
Heh. On LW you can discuss whether feminism makes sense and how much—that by itself is enough to label it as “antifeminist” in certain circles.
Thank you. I’m still confused, though, because I started out at 0 karma for the month, making the changes in the numbers non-equal. I’m now on {16, 2}, which is consistent with {12,-2}, though.
Remember that the change in karma-for-the-month is the sum of two things: changes now and changes a month ago. So it can jump down even when nothing interesting just happened, if you got a bunch of upvotes 30 days ago.
But the big jump was in karma, not karma-for-the-month. My karma-for-the-month went down by two and my karma went down by 25. I’m now on {20, 5}, which is inconsistent with the {12, −2} and {16, 2} from earlier today.
Karma-for-the-month is karma on your last month’s postings, not the last month’s votes on all your postings. If your total plummets while KftM hardly changes, it means a bunch of old posts got downvoted.