We have seen posters motivated enough to engage in karmassasination of users making right wing arguments so this seems plausible. The weight of evidence certainly seems to be on the alt-right side quite strongly on several issues and has been building ever more that way for decades.
Yet the demographics of metacontrarianism however are something we should keep in mind. Perhaps people clever enough to construct on their own novel arguments rather than just picking them up from academia or mainstream political tradition don’t yet have much to signal by doing this. If 10 or 20% of LWers where conservatives and another 10% of reactionaries perhaps they would. For now though they stay in the alternative right wing camp where the fun ideas and displays of cleverness are to be had. I’m basing that number on anti-libertarian arguments being viable in our community.
When people talk about karma assassination, what tools do they use for keeping track?
All I’ve got is the count by my name and checking back for a few pages of my comments. I would like to get information about which comments have the most recent karma changes.
And not to be paranoid, but I think I had about 14 points go away a few days ago for no apparent reason. I’m not sure whether I misremembered my total, or someone found a bunch of comments they didn’t like, or it was just spite.
I don’t know of any tools per se. I suspect that people have a track of what karma most of their recent comments had, so they can simply check by looking there. There are also some subtle signs: For example, for most people the common karma on a comment is zero. So even if you don’t remember your karma (or if you are looking at someone else’s) and there are a lot of recent comments at −1 on a variety of different subjects that don’t look obviously bad, that’s a sign.
So that certainly sounds like karma assassination to me (assuming that you remembered the number correctly before hand). In general, karma almost always is increasing if one is a user in good standing, so on any given day, the variance will for most days probably be a question of how much it goes up by more than anything else. A drop of 14 in a single day in that context seems extreme.
If I see that almost all of the last 20 comments I published before yesterday at three o’ clock have 1 point less than they used to (including apparently unobjectionable ones such as me answering a relevant question), and almost none of more recent or more ancient comments do, then I guess something fishy is going on.
We have seen posters motivated enough to engage in karmassasination of users making right wing arguments so this seems plausible. The weight of evidence certainly seems to be on the alt-right side quite strongly on several issues and has been building ever more that way for decades.
Yet the demographics of metacontrarianism however are something we should keep in mind. Perhaps people clever enough to construct on their own novel arguments rather than just picking them up from academia or mainstream political tradition don’t yet have much to signal by doing this. If 10 or 20% of LWers where conservatives and another 10% of reactionaries perhaps they would. For now though they stay in the alternative right wing camp where the fun ideas and displays of cleverness are to be had. I’m basing that number on anti-libertarian arguments being viable in our community.
It seems possibly relevant to point out that karma assasination has been occurring in the last few days to people of a wide variety of political viewpoints. For example the recent thread on women’s experience was reported as leading to multiple incidents of karma assassination to people espousing views classically labeled as feminist.
Engagement in karma fights probably doesn’t give much data about accuracy of beliefs or peoples confidence in their own belief structures.
When people talk about karma assassination, what tools do they use for keeping track?
All I’ve got is the count by my name and checking back for a few pages of my comments. I would like to get information about which comments have the most recent karma changes.
And not to be paranoid, but I think I had about 14 points go away a few days ago for no apparent reason. I’m not sure whether I misremembered my total, or someone found a bunch of comments they didn’t like, or it was just spite.
I don’t know of any tools per se. I suspect that people have a track of what karma most of their recent comments had, so they can simply check by looking there. There are also some subtle signs: For example, for most people the common karma on a comment is zero. So even if you don’t remember your karma (or if you are looking at someone else’s) and there are a lot of recent comments at −1 on a variety of different subjects that don’t look obviously bad, that’s a sign.
Edit: Over what time span was the 14 point drop?
Less than a day.
So that certainly sounds like karma assassination to me (assuming that you remembered the number correctly before hand). In general, karma almost always is increasing if one is a user in good standing, so on any given day, the variance will for most days probably be a question of how much it goes up by more than anything else. A drop of 14 in a single day in that context seems extreme.
If I see that almost all of the last 20 comments I published before yesterday at three o’ clock have 1 point less than they used to (including apparently unobjectionable ones such as me answering a relevant question), and almost none of more recent or more ancient comments do, then I guess something fishy is going on.