Voiceofra is banned

Voting for a new CEO is dramatically more effective than the board trying to micromanage the current CEO with rules. Find a reasonable person and let them be flexibly reasonable.

I believe that Nancy is conservative enough with management that this is not a real danger.

As Romeo noted, Nancy was appointed roughly by popular acclaim (more like, a small number of highly dedicated and respected users appointing her, and no one objecting). I think it's reasonable in general to give mods a lot of discretionary power, and trust other veteran users to step in if things take a turn for the worse.

Exactly.

Please, don't ban anonymous account, there are at least couple people who regularly use it. It is rare that anyone would use it for voting, it was the first time I have logged in and noticed so much upvoting and downvoting in a single thread. Sometimes I find a couple of votes in a thread, and I often revert them, but that's it. Maybe there were previous incidents in the past, but I haven't noticed them. Of course, things like that relies on goodwill. If someone started abusing it, there would be no choice except to ban it.

By the way, thank you Nancy. You do a job that is often unpleasant, but necessary.

Definitely don't unless strong evidence emerges of an actual serious problem. Having an effectively anon account is valuable.

+1 to the anon who used the "username2" account to post the parent comment. IIRC, there was an original "username" account, the use of which of collectively discontinued several months ago because its value to the community was co-opted by abusive anonymous users logging into it. I would hate to see that happen a second time, to "username2". If it were to happen a second time, that would disincentivize necessary, honest, and respectful use of the anonymous account. If that became the norm, even if there were a "username3", the perception might become there isn't a general anonymous account on LessWrong for users. If people stopped trusting the resource completely, that would be sad. Also, it might send the signal to disrespectful anonymous users they can make or use as many anonymous accounts as they want, and the moderators would do little or nothing to stop them. This last point strikes me as unlikely, though, especially if LW mods have the power to block specific IP addresses.

SO also has direct rate limiting (40 votes a day). I do think that it makes sense to have a separate rate limit for user-user links; maybe I can vote 100 times a day and have it be normal, but voting even 10 times a day on a particular user might means something funny is going on.

If low effort, only because it's obvious to anyone who is paying attention. If useless, only because it's been repeated so many times by so many people.

It's low effort because it took you 10 seconds to think it and write it.

And LW isn't "mine" in any meaningful sense. I try to fix things that are mine

Seems to me there is little reason for you to offer advice at all, then.

It should also be proportional to a voter's karma. An upvote from established users like gwern or NancyLebovitz should carry more weight than an upvote from a lurker.

No, not public of course. The currently 122 comments to the present post illustrate how it's very distracting to announce moderation actions in a way that invites public discussion.

Perhaps you could disable downvoting functionality for those with a karma ratio lower than 75% or 80%?

"Please provide proof of your complete integration with the hive-mind before being allowed near the downvote button" X-D

Lumifer, your karma ratio is 80%.

Reddit archives threads after six months. At that point, you can't comment or vote, but you can edit and delete your own comments.

"Mass down-voting"

That's still not a technical definition.

I'd permit upvoting on old content

I don't like introducing asymmetries into voting. That "so what is your affirmative answer?" slope is quite slippery.

The mono- or polycentricity of the legal system doesn't have much to do with the Rule of Law, aka how hard the rules are. If the rules are soft and are bent on a regular basis, it doesn't matter how many people are doing the bending.

I didn't think of that, but do you think karma shouldn't depend on the order in which votes are made? Shouldn't a person who gets 20 downvotes followed by 20 upvotes have higher karma at the end than a person who had 20 upvotes followed by 20 downvotes? The first indicates improvement; the second indicates getting less interesting over time.

I am confused by how you're doing the computation, though. If half of X's votes on Y are positive and half are negative, I would expect to compute X's total contribution to Y as zero. I wouldn't keep a running sum of X's contribution to Y's karma on each thing Y has said. We can also go back and recompute the contribution to previous comments as X makes more comments. But I'd probably rather have an adaptive algorithm so that the score on individual comments reflects the situation at the moment the rating was made.

Even if we did it that way, though, this sensitivity is not a real problem. Nearly every adaptive algorithm or learning algorithm has that kind of sensitivity. It never matters in practice when there's enough data. Text compression algorithms don't have drastically different compression ratios if you swap text input blocks around.

There no good reason for the votes of new posters to count much. If they don't there are less sockpuppet problems.

Why do you think that? When you have no prior, either assume P(up) = P(down), or (better) use the priors gotten by averaging all votes by all users. That's standard practice.

What are the odds that every person on LessWrong will see and vote on every comment made by this one person? This is not a real scenario. If you're worried about it, though, "a model that blended X's voting pattern overall with X's voting on Y's posts and comments" will solve that problem.

(Note: my earlier comment was nonsense, based on a misreading of what Richard wrote.)

That does seem to be what Phil says, but in the the scheme I have in my head after reading Phil's proposal, things go a little differently. For the avoidance of doubt, I am claiming neither that Phil would want this nor that it's the right thing to do.

• Suppose A votes on something B wrote. They have some history: A has voted +1, 0, -1 on u,v,w of B's things in the past. Here u+v+w is the total number of things B's ever written.
  • I think we probably want to ignore the ones A hasn't voted on. So we care only about u and w.
• What should our prediction be? One simple answer: we assign probabilities proportional to u+1,w+1 to votes +1,-1 on A's next vote. (This is basically Laplace's rule of succession, or equivalently it's what we get if we suppose A's votes are independently random with unknown fixed probabilities and start with a flat prior on those probabilities.)
  • We might actually want to start with a different prior on the probabilities, which would mean offsetting u and w by different amounts.
• Now along comes A's vote, which is (let's call it) a, which is either +1 or -1. The score it produces is - a log(Pr(A votes a | history)); that is, - log (u+1)/(u+w+2) if A votes +1, and + log (w+1)/(u+w+2) if A votes -1. This is added to the score for whatever it is B wrote, and to B's overall total score.

With this scheme, an upvote always has positive effect and a downvote always has negative effect, but as you make the same vote over and over again it is less and less effective. For instance, suppose A upvotes everything B posts. Then A's first upvote counts for -log(1/2); the next for -log(2/3); the next for -log(3/4); etc. The total effect of n upvotes (and nothing else) is to contribute log n to B's score.

There are some things about this that feel a little unsatisfactory. I will mention three. First: although "vote counts for plus or minus number of bits of information conveyed" sounds pretty good, on reflection it feels not-quite-right. The situation is a bit like that of estimating the heads-probability of a biased coin, in which case what you do on each new result is almost to adjust by +- the information you just got but not quite, and the aggregated result is somewhat different. Second: the overall result of a sequence of votes, with this scheme, can depend quite a bit on the order in which they occur, and that doesn't feel like what we want. Third: the overall result's dependence on individual votes can actually be "backwards". If you vote +,-,-,+ you get -log(1/2)+log(1/3)+log(1/2)-log(2/5) = log(5/6), which is negative; but if you vote -,-,-,+ you get +log(1/2)+log(2/3)+log(3/4)-log(1/5) = log(5/4), which is positive!

That seems highly undesirable. Maybe what Phil has in mind avoids these problems without incurring worse ones. The most obvious way to avoid them that I see, though, involves moving a little way away from the "effect of vote is bits" paradigm, as follows.

Implicit in those probability calculations is the model I mentioned above: A's votes on B are independent Bernoulli with fixed but unknown probability p that each one is up rather than down, and we begin with a flat prior over p. Suppose we stick with that model, and ask what we know about p after some of A's votes. Then the answer (famously) is that our posterior for p after seeing u upvotes and w downvotes is distributed as Beta(u+1,w+1), whose mean is (u+1)/(u+w+2). So, e.g., our expectation for A's next vote is (u-w)/(u+w+2). So, e.g., we could take A's total contribution to B's score to be exactly this; and do the obvious thing with scores for individual comments and posts: weight each vote by 1/(#votes+2), where #votes in the denominator is the number of times the voter in question has voted on things by the poster in question.

This suggests a broader family of schemes, where each vote is weighted by f(#votes) where f is some other decreasing function. If you feel, as I think I do, that the overall effect of many votes by A on B shouldn't actually be bounded by a small multiple of the effect of one vote, you might want f to decrease more slowly. Perhaps take f = square root, or something like that.

All of these revised schemes have the property that it's always better to have more upvotes and fewer downvotes, it's just that A's influence on B's score gets less as A's votes on B get more numerous. And votes from different people just add. So if someone posts what everyone regards as dreck, all the downvotes they get will in fact hurt them.

(Possible downside: the advantage of using sockpuppets becomes much greater, and therefore presumably also the temptation to use them.)

That seems pretty reasonable to me.

[EDITED to add: except that what I was saying "seems pretty reasonable" was not in fact what Richard wrote; I misread. See comments below.]

Stack Overflow makes cast vote counts public, so one could get an idea of who is doing the voting. Figuring out who is voting on what would only be possible if you're watching everyone always (and even then it won't work if user displays only update periodically).

I do think that there's value in someone looking at the vote graph, be it humans or automated processes.

All security is through obscurity. Obscurity of a bitting pattern, of a private key, of a password, of an algorithmic optimization strategy.

That phrase, and the sneer encoded in it, does have some wisdom, but it's more complex than "If you're relying on obscurity you're doing it wrong", being a criticism of a much more specific fault than relying on obscurity, which is, after all, the only thing that has ever worked. That criticism is this: Suppressing knowledge of security faults provides only a false sense of security in a system whose faults thus are held unknown to everybody except those with the strongest specific interest in possessing knowledge of those faults. Which is to say, if your strategy to a security fault is to hide it, rather than fix it, you're setting yourself up for failure later.

But that is all moot, because my suggestion had more in common with bypassing a lock than in protecting one. Secrecy is desired because of something most like other people's poor security, and the desire they not improve it.

I think this is a reasonable rule.

I agree that 800 is too much, and appropriate for banning.

Since you can "unvote" any particular karma vote you've made, wouldn't it be easy enough to implement limits on downvotes of a particular person in day, week, month, year?

You reach your max, and the next time you try, you are prevented, and you get a message saying "It is a bannable offense to karma bomb other users". That could be a rollover and a triggered message sent to your account.

(Note that the limits could be parameterized in increasingly complicated ways (scaled to karma of "victim", perhaps). The point is not "the perfect set of limits", but to find something better than the current limits. The problem can be ameliorated, not annihilated in all hypothetical cases. Life is full of tradeoffs. )

Problem limited and offenders who try to game the system are warned (I think the second is important too).

That should take care of all but the most committed douchebags without any required intervention from you.

As one of the Powers That Be Who Does Something Useful Around Here, I'd hope that your needs in your chosen useful duties would have pull with the feature development queue.

(EDIT: Maybe easier to run a nightly scan notifying people when they have gone over their limits. )

Most non-regular users of LessWrong would draw that incorrect conclusion. For instance, prospective users, journalists and critics.

No. This is called 'shadowbanning' and is a standard practice.

That would depend on how many banned users there were. Also, I don't think there would need to be whole versions of the site for each banned user-- there would just be dif versions computed on the fly.

I'm quite uncomfortable with the suggestion for another reason. It wouldn't work-- an active user would probably notice something was wrong in less than a day. If they were banned for excessive hostility, they'd presumably come back under another name.

My first thought was that it might be bad for the group to have people disappear for no apparent reason, but then it occurred to me that people stop posting for all sorts of reasons.

You are right. I also think it would be a good idea to rename the account.

I think it's bad form to make costly (in terms of time) requests to moderators unless you're willing to be part of the solution.

No, that's the moderator's responsibility to explain why they have taken their course of action. I don't care about time.

it would be good at minimum to outline exactly what you mean by a "transparency report"

I quoted the exact part I wanted an explanation on.

I can't reply to your other comment (karma)

You don't care about how much time your requests cost me? Nice to know.

Here's what your wrote, first line of this post:

I've gotten sufficient evidence from support that voiceofra has been doing retributive downvoting. I've banned them without prior notice because I'm not giving them more chances to downvote.

If you have sufficient evidence, why can't you publish it?

Yes, but this post is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Not really.

Maintenance is fine. But the lack of content is priority one with a bullet IMO. If the power user base wants to divvy up resources rationally, I think this sort of ban is very low on the list.