Please do not downvote every comment or post someone has ever made as a retaliation tactic.

What's worse, since downvoting is limited by karma, it's not some random lurkers. Users with fairly high karma must be wasting their time doing this.

Definitely. I also think it happened to me a second time, though I'm a bit less sure (not all my comments where visible through my user page any more).

(Edit: other examples in this very thread)

Are you sure that someone went ahead and did that and that you didn't just have a few downvotes of old top-level posts happen to occur within a short span of each other? Or alternatively someone could have been going through and reading your comments systematically and they disagreed with a lot more than they agreed so they downvoted more than they upvoted?

Nah, they were dropping in clumps of like 6 a piece every few seconds as I refreshed the page. It happens to other people too.

Is there any opinion or attitude of yours that you think would be particularly likely to trigger this sort of response?

Partially it is because I write about things like Thomism in a really obscure way that appears masturbatory. I generally disregard local norms of communication. People have no idea why I do this but they assume it's because I am either insane, extremely prone to compartmentalization, or choosing to defect against the tribe for some reason. It seems to them that I consistently choose not to provide evidence that would lead them to expect otherwise. I assume that they think that allowing such blatant defection makes LW look bad or generally sets a bad precedent and so feel justified in downvoting many of my comments into oblivion and occasionally downvoting all my posts. They don't often downvote all my comments too. Maybe they're trying to be subtle? The first time I checked LW and had 300 karma less than the previous day I wasn't quite sure what had happened and just ignored it. It's easy to miss.

The most recent mass downvoting could have been caused by one of two things. I think it's because I repeatedly told Eliezer that he sucks at reading in a very public thread but I'm not certain of that.

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Asymmetric voting reduces the informativeness of the karma ratings. See also EY's point here: that if views are distributed evenly, but people speak up only when they're on one of the sides, then you get the wrong impression about the consensus.

I rarely if ever downvote someone's initial post on a conversation branch, even if poorly formed. I'll ask them to clarify their position and if they have a massive rationality failure in their response to this THEN I downvote.

I try to vote according to policies I think of as "Pro-social Content Promotion" mixed with "Debate Judgement" mixed with "Personal Appreciation Sessions".

A personal appreciation session involves no downvoting and is the opposite of karmassassination, except its not indiscriminate upvoting -- instead I work through someone's oeuvre looking for unappreciated diamonds to upvote. Mostly I do this for newbies with new and interesting perspectives who I want to come back and say more in the same vein.

The first two policies can involve downvoting. They require making relative judgements (between sibling content for promotion and between parent-child content for judging) and then voting so as to nudge the content closer to my ideal. If a superior comment has few votes relative to a worse comment, I'll vote the better one up and the worse one down. If I come back later and the relative votes have become too unbalanced some other way (say with sibling comments of mixed quality bubbling into the system), I may reverse votes to bring the total closer to my ideal again. However, I use 0 as a floor, so most of my voting involves trying to pick N/2 comments with 0, 1, or 2 votes to upvote from among the N that I found at that level... to upvote all but one "0 voted" comment would inject relatively few bits into the system, whereas upvoting roughly half of them maximizes the informativeness of my votes :-)

The only things I push negative are things which I believe actively lower the sanity waterline of the community by bringing up issues we are unlikely to be able to handle reasonably (for example "politics is the mind killer" triggers) and then I use -4 as the target value for "the least offensive such thing" and only go deeper into negative if many negative comments are siblings, to express gradations of displeasure (-4, -5, -6... which basically never happens in practice). Mostly I upvote things that are already negative where someone else presumably "didn't like it" but I think it's "merely of low quality" rather than actively waterline threatening.

I don't do so unless I feel very strongly about something - a comment explaining my disagreement or disapproval is more productive

Sometimes, sometimes not. If I see a comment that's most likely wrong but sounds belligerent, confused or pedantic (or was posted by someone with a track record of being belligerent, confused or pedantic) then I sometimes predict that posting a reply would just suck me into a futile, time-wasting argument. In those cases I happily downvote without bothering to reply. (Other times I prefer to reply to and downvote very misleading comments.)

a comment explaining my disagreement or disapproval is more productive

Also more costly and sometimes useless, if somebody else has already explained the same reasons.

doesn't make the downvotee feel bad

Disagreement often makes people feel bad, even if explained (and sometimes more because it is explained).

and I frequently get karma because people will upvote my comment

If all people never downvoted like you suggest, having positive karma would mean nothing. Paradoxically, the worth of karma you get for not downvoting depends on other users' occasional downvoting.

I agree with you, but also further believe that karma is a meaningless metric for sorting comments and etc. A cursory glance of the highest karma users demonstrates that it's mostly used for political reasons.

It isn't really clever, but I think biasing the pubic perception of LessWrong discourse is the point of doing so. I don't know how much good it will do to try and alleviate this by appealing to their sense of honour.

From what I can tell the point is sometimes to discredit and warn people who someone thinks are straying close to topics that the someone doesn't like. Bleh, too tired for clear grammar. Anyway. If so, this is incredibly dangerous; it can easily provoke escalation. Don't be stupid. (Edit: I mean, "You who are considering engaging in the above-mentioned retaliation, don't be stupid." Sorry that wasn't clear.)

plausible code solutions for this?

I really don't like the idea of "legislating morality", i.e. building community norms of behavior into the structure of the site (such as, for example, taking away the ability to delete comments because of widespread disapproval of the way this feature has been used by some [Roko]).

Having said that, I'm really surprised that no one has suggested the most obvious "fix", which would be to disallow voting from user pages. (I don't necessarily endorse implementing this, but if something is going to be "done", this seems the least harmful.)

Apparently I need to be more threatening to people's worldviews.

I don't think that's low-level enough. You probably have to threaten peoples' group standing or hunting territory or something.

In this comment, JoshuaZ says that it's 4x total karma.

And I don't think you need to make it per day. Five downvotes allowed per person per 5 minutes solves this problem.

Every useful code fix that I can imagine also blocks some valid voting behavior. But perhaps a more manual approach would help: if the karma of user X drops by more than Y points within time period Z, flag his account and have an admin review the sources of his karma loss, possibly taking disciplinary action towards the downvoters.

Downsides: takes a lot of coding to implement, requires effort on part of the admins, violates downvote anonymity.

Could something like Slashdot's metamoderation system be implemented for LessWrong? The upvote/downvote system and content management in general seems to be based on reddit's system, and so I don't know whether or not the above would be nontrivial.

I see that people are downvoting you but it's not clear to me but it's as a retaliation tactic. Have you considered the hypothesis that you're just writing comments that many people think are bad for one reason or another?

Well, I've seen this happen to newbies who take contrarian positions.

Imagine a thousand professional philosophers would join lesswrong

Completely off topic but my ... a few hundred LWers vs. thousands of professional philosophers. That sounds like an idea for a fanfic webcomic.

"A thousand proponents of mainstream philosophy descend upon you! Our down votes will blot out the sequences!"

If people had to actually write a comment to voice their disagreement, everyone would benefit.

No, if someone e.g starts randomly insulting people, or being utterly clumsy in their reasoning, and then everyone would have to voice their disagreement, repeatedly, that would be noise atop of noise. It would crowd out any signal in the discussion.

Some types of disagreement at least need be able to be expressed without noising up the place. One of these is "You're very obviously wrong, and this comment is bad for this place, and it's bad for this place that I even have to use two sentences to you to explain why".

The person who is wrong would benefit by being provided an actual explanation for why someone disagrees

Even in the better cases scenario where there are no trolls or spammers involved -- what makes you think that you have to choose between only the options "Someone disagrees with you and you don't know why" and "Someone disagrees with you, and you're told why" -- and you don't consider the third option "You have no way of knowing if anyone agrees or disagrees with you"?

You seem to think that the only alternative of "downvoting and not commenting" is "commenting" -- so that we need only prevent downvotes to encourage discussion. Ofcourse there are atleast two alternatives instead, and one of them is "not downvoting and not commenting either".

Then the members wouldn't get any feedback, not even that of a downvote/upvote; they wouldn't even know if anyone even read their posts.

I'd find that even more depressing. An upvote or a downvote is atleast knowledge that someone read what I had to say.

The person who disagrees would have to be more specific and maybe name some concrete reasons for their disagreement and that way notice that

No, another option they would have is to not reply at all. Or to call other people names. Or to lower the tone of the conversation.

A downvote is an easy way to tell someone "I believe you're doing something wrong" without the addition of noise.

The availability of a reputation system also discourages people to actually explain themselves by being able to let off steam or ignore cognitive dissonance by downvoting someone with a single mouse click. If people had to actually write a comment to voice their disagreement, everyone would benefit.

An extremely doubtful assertion - it seems much more likely that a raised feedback threshold would have the effect of reducing feedback levels.

Imagine a thousand professional philosophers would join lesswrong, or worse, a thousand creationists.

This test seems rather unfair--it's pretty much a known that people who join LessWrong are likely to be already sympathetic to the LessWrong's way of thinking. Besides, the only way to avoid a situation where thousands of dissidents joining could wreck the system is to have centralized power, i.e., more traditional moderation, which I think we were hoping to avoid for exactly the types of reasons that are being brought up here (politics, etc.).

The availability of a reputation system also discourages people to actually explain themselves by being able to let off steam or ignore cognitive dissonance by downvoting someone with a single mouse click.

True, but I think you have missed a positive incentive for response that is created by the reputation system in addition to the negative ones--a post/comment with a bad argument or worse creates an opportunity to win karma by writing a clear refutation, and I frequently see such responses being highly upvoted.

The initial population of a community might have been biased about something and the reputation system might provide a positive incentive to keep the bias and a negative incentive for those who disagree.

This is a problem, but based purely on my subjective experience it seems that people are more than willing to upvote posts that try to shatter a conventional LessWrong belief, and do so with good argumentation.

Quoting Eliezer:

One of my ever-pending posts to write is on what sort of simple interface might prevent online arguments from retracing the same points over and over. I suspect it will not be graphical with boxes, because that makes poor use of screen real estate. I suspect it will not have lots of fancy argument types and patterns, because no one really uses that stuff. I think it does need to have a karma system, because otherwise there's no way to find the good stuff.

The basic rationale is filtering; the current system is satisficing, given some reasonable assumptions as to how online communities work, and has the "feature" of being inherited from a successful web site and thus being a "proven solution" rather than something speculative designed from scratch.

The major issue with LW's current karma system is information cascades; that has been acknowledged almost from the start of LW. Yet solutions intended to correct this have not been widely adopted.

The main reason to have a karma system, IMO, is to make discussions more readable by ordering comments by quality. This seems to work very well. Providing feedback to commenters is another important reason. But keeping a record of everyone's accumulated karma isn't necessary for either of those functions, and that feature could possibly be gotten rid of entirely.

I would love to see a post on the rational behind the reputation system on this site.

Well, reputation systems are good. More could be said, but that is the gist.

I'm kicking myself for not registering my prediction.

Another problem is that a reputation system might drive away people with valuable insights about certain agreed upon topics.

Relax, I doubt anyone with the ability to produce high-quality thinking is so insecure that (s)he'd be scared of getting a few downvotes on a website. (Myself, I once got an article submission voted to oblivion, but it just felt good in a feeling-of-superiority kind of way since I thought the LW community was the party being more wrong there -- though I think that to have found myself to be more wrong than I think I was would have felt good too.)

In general, I find it weird how some people manage to take the karma system so seriously. I thought it was acknowledged all along by the community that it's a very crude thing with only very limited usefulness (though still worth having).

I see my karma go up without anything on my first page of comments changing all the time; it makes me wish I could see all recent changes to my karma so I could go back and participate in any older discussions that might be re-opening.

Perhaps sparklines would work for this. They compress the recent history of a measurement in a space-efficient way which can fit inline with text.

Personally I'd prefer if the limit was only on downvotes. Sometimes I see a really good conversation and want to upvote 5 comments in quick succession.

That comment was downvoted for engaging in a tired debate which had already been resolved to everyone else's satisfaction. The prior for "The U.S. government will intentionally murder thousands of its own citizens in a fake terrorist attack" is very low; the abundant evidence (including hundreds of eyewitnesses) that, y'know, planes crashed into the towers makes it even more unlikely. One piece of cherry-picked evidence against the obvious facts was obviously insufficient to change anyone's opinion (furthermore, it wasn't even the point of the post), so it was downvoted.

For the same reason, I downvote "evidence" presented for various religions. The issue has been decided; no given piece of evidence is going to change anyone's opinion, and rehashing the issue is a waste of everyone's time. Political incorrectness has nothing to do with it.

In a website devoted to rationality shouldn't it be a rule that you can't downvote evidence?

No.

A comment might, for example, present evidence in a misleading way (e.g. by being selective in presenting evidence or by describing evidence in a way that nudges readers toward a particular false conclusion). I'd be against a rule against downvoting comments like that.

I doubt that being politically incorrect was the main reason that comment got downvoted.

For example, people might have believed for their own reasons that your comment was invalid. Or maybe they thought that since the topic often leads to dead ends, the comment should be downvoted as if you knew this and still headed into the dead end. People also may have interpreted you as trying to actually change peoples' minds, and thus felt disapproving or even insulted when you expected their minds to be changed by a small amount of evidence compared to that already available.

And what proportion of the downvotes came in after you added, essentially, "I'm so disappointed in you all for downvoting this." 50%?

All it provides is a link to a video

It is a waste of time.

The video may be tiny, tiny, tiny evidence against the claim made. The fact that this was the video someone chose as evidence against the claim is a good deal more significant, and is evidence for the claim that overwhelms the tiny, tiny evidence.

Yet it still is a waste of time to present small evidence in favor of conclusions people already believe, even more so than it would be to bring infinitesimally small evidence against such claims.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/5kz/the_5second_level/44im

It's -19 now, after my own downvote. I've not yet seen that Youtube -- I downvoted it just for the obsession with counting your downvotes. 3/4ths of that post are you complaining about the downvotes. Sheesh.

And since you ask people in the same post NOT to upvote it, I think it will keep going down, as it has no way of going up.

Downvoted, for seemingly seeking to force everyone to waste time and space, just so that a very rare and very slight abuse of the system doesn't have the chance to occur.

Either you have other additional reasons to make you favor this suggestion (in short you'd want an explanation of downvotes to be made mandatory regardless of such incidents) and thus your suggestion improperly disguises itself as a suggested solution to this problem -- or you've just not bothered to make a cost-benefit analysis in regards to the repercussion of your suggestion. Or both.