A few remarks about mass-downvoting

Huh. Now that someone has been caught very much doing this, did you find out why you couldn't detect it before?

Many thanks for looking into this!

What have you/they been trying to do? Unsupervised detection of mass-downvoting, or exploration of particular specific cases alleged to have occurred? If the latter, do the records not show the downvotes at all, or do they show downvotes from many different individuals in each case?

(Does the database contain information about when any given downvote happened? I guess probably not, which makes diagnosis more difficult.)

For example: I've been having ~5-10 recent and older comments downvoted per day, I think all during UK night-time or early morning (i.e., roughly 4pm to 2am Pacific), most days (I think all) for about the last 4 or 5. Approximately all of the recent-ish comments I've checked appear to have been downvoted exactly once. (A few very recent ones haven't been. A couple have been downvoted more than once; I guess that they were genuinely disliked on their (de)merits.)

If someone has the time to look, it would be interesting to know: Do the records show that those comments have been downvoted, and by whom? One downvoter, or a few, or many? Any signs of sockpuppetry, if many?

One possibility (though an unappealing one, not a very likely one a priori, and one that I feel a bit paranoid even mentioning) is a sort of downvoting ring of people willing to cooperate on downvoting at a rate just slow enough to avoid suspicion. That would be bad. And also sad.

[EDITED to add: I'd offer to help with the investigating, but as an interested party I probably shouldn't.]

[EDITED again to add: at 2014-02-15 08:41 GMT, it looks as if I haven't had a pile of downvotes in the last 8-10 hours. Maybe whoever it is has got bored, or maybe they've noticed evidence of someone looking. Or, of course, maybe I'm making the whole thing up, but anyone who finds that likely and cares to check can look at my comment history and see the evidence.]

Can you give us some details on how the votes are stored in the server? This may be difficult/impossible to do in an offline fashion if the right sort of data isn't available.

I've done a minor version of mass downvoting-- I normally let mildly annoying comments go, but I'll downvote them if they're from one particular poster.

I think if I'd notice that I always tend to downvote some person's comments when I see them, I might end up looking at their history for comments I'm likely to also disfavor. But I wouldn't downvote their comments just because they're the one who made them; I'd judge each comment individually. I don't know if this is against community norms.

Two features of this poll make me doubt its usefulness:

1. You don't define 'systematic'. I've gone through user histories and looked at lots of their old comments, doling out lots of positive or negative karma in a short period of time based on the quality of the old comments. But I have no idea whether that makes me a 'systematic downvoter' or 'mass downvoter' in the sense people here are worried about. Your last question is particularly ambiguous, since it's not clear whether 'e.g. looking if a user has a history of other bad comments' is meant to be an example of 'systematic' or of 'not systematic' down-voting.

2. You don't allow people to express agnostic or highly uncertain views about anything. You allow 'tends toward X' and 'don't care', but not 'I don't know'. I think I gave overly extreme answers because I do care about this issue and about whether it's harming the community, but I don't have a clear view yet of whether it's net harmful.

Have to revise my poll answer. 92% of my comments from the past month were downvoted today.

I reported "never been mass downvoted", but in the past few hours 92% of my comments since January 29th were downvoted :-/.

I wasn't logged in when I initially filled out this survey, and the cookies in my browser might have been acting funny for whatever reason. So, I may have mistakenly filled out this form twice. If I did without anonymity, ignore my duplicate result. If it was anonymous, and it appears a user did enter twice, and the results are the same, then ignore one of them, as it could easily be from me.

I disagree about having this problem solved by moderators. Changing the karma system would be preferable i.e. by removing the downvotes or having downvotes only affect the individual post but not on the total karma of the user.

(a) There is some evidence that engaging in discussions on gender and taking a view nearer the "feminist" than the "reactionary" end of the spectrum sometimes results in getting hit by mass-downvoting. I'm not sure whether other (leftish?) political opinions provoke it.

(b) I don't know how much is "so much", and hence in particular whether it's true that people care about karma "so much". But the karma system is part of how LW is built; it's meant to be somewhat motivating for writers and somewhat informative for readers. Indiscriminate downvoting (or for that matter indiscriminate upvoting, though oddly one rarely hears of people complaining that this has happened to them) of a particular user's comments is liable to distort both.

Why do people care about karma so much?

Because people are not rational, and, in particular do not like negative feedback.

Maybe you should contact him directly?

In my experience contacting him directly has been useless and he claims that there is no way whatsoever to check a suspect's voting history.

This along with the semi-regular accounts of downvote abuse makes me question what advantages a +/- system has over a strictly + system. The ego threat of being downvoted seems more like a contribution deterrent than a learning signal. Is there anyone who could explain to me why the current system is better?

If someone's goal is to mass-downvote all comments made by someone else, this wouldn't stop them at all. Just keep the page open in another tab, and every N minutes downvote the next comment.

For people who read quickly and vote in real time, it would be inconvenient. (For example, Stack Exchange has a similar thing: I can read a short comment in 1 second, but I am allowed to vote only once per 5 seconds. So I read 20 comments in a row and then close the page without voting, because I don't see a point in waiting.)

I don't know anything about LW's internals, but in most sane architectures you'd want to have a last-downvote timestamp linked to each user's account, and to compare the timing of incoming downvotes against it. If the difference is too small, you reject the input and display a message similar to the one you get when you're about to post in a heavily downvoted thread. That message has a few issues -- it doesn't come up if the vote total upthread dropped below the threshold between when the page was loaded and when the post was submitted -- but since we only care about session-local behavior here, that shouldn't be a problem. Synchronization between the session and server time might be harder but that depends on details I don't know.

I can see a behavioral pitfall, though. I typically decide on votes after reading through a screen's worth or so of a thread, and this sometimes implies two or more downvotes (for example in the cases of short low-quality posts or discussions inappropriate for the site). I'd find it gratingly aversive to be forced to wait N seconds or minutes between posts in these cases; I don't know if this happens often enough to outweigh the mass-downvoting problem, though.

I agree with Nornagest that this would be really annoying for many non-abusive posters.

I'm also not sure how effective it would be against abusive mass down-voters. Whoever's currently stalking me is systematically downvoting a bunch of my old comments every day. I assume s/he is just gradually going through LW's list of my comments. It doesn't seem like it would be difficult to do it gradually throughout the day, or even to write a computer program to do it automatically.

"Make my votes public" only applies to votes on top level posts, not votes on comments. Mr Hen turned it on, so his about page has, in addition to the normal "Comments" and "Submitted" tabs, tabs called "Liked" and "Disliked" (also, "Hidden," whatever that means*; some people have a "Drafts" section, but it's usually empty). Liked and Disliked show posts that he voted on. The point is for people who share his taste to get recommendations. It is not convenient for posters to find out how he voted on their posts, presumably by design.

* I'd expect Hidden to be related to the preferences choices "don't show me posts after I've [dis]liked them," but it doesn't seem to match in his case.

I don't feel this is very much an issue with the karma system, just a problem with "mean people suck". No matter what technical system is in place, there will probably be some ways for people to be meanies---sending lots of nasty personal messages from behind a TOR proxy, for instance. The fact that in this case they decided to (ab)use the voting system is incidental, and a solution need not involve making any dramatic changes to how the voting mechanisms work.

I'd say A is the dominant signal, but B is getting stronger all the time.

You reckon the scores on individual comments are substantially a matter of the commenter's involvement in LW, CFAR, MIRI, etc.? That seems very surprising to me, and I can't say I've noticed it. If so, it's the same sort of problem as mass-downvoting: it would mean that comment scores are assessments of people rather than comments, and on the basis of something other than the quality of what they write. That would be very bad.

I'm apathetic about their apathy.

OK. I'm left wondering why you bothered to write that paragraph, though. Perhaps I'm apathetic about your apathy about those people's apathy.

More than five times ever? That's going to be a problem for long-term participants.

More than five times in some fixed period? That would make more sense, though it might need extra information recorded in the database. The right way might be something like this. For each pair of users, store an "amount of recent downvoting" that decays exponentially over time and gets incremented with each downvote; then apply a karma toll that increases with the value of this. It would also be necessary to store the last time the downvote density was updated, so that the exponential decay can be applied properly.

There are online fora where downvoting costs you some of your own karma. That might be an effective compromise.

I like in principle the idea of weighting more informative votes more. I suppose what you'd want is that a vote counts for +/- log p where p is the fraction of the voter's votes that are the same as it. (I'm not sure whether you'd want to count "neither up nor down" as a vote for this purpose. Let's say we don't.) So if someone downvotes everything, her downvotes would be worth nothing, but then her first upvote would be worth log N where N is her total number of votes. If we take the logs to base 2, then a vote either way from someone who upvotes and downvotes equally would be worth exactly 1 unit.

That would be kinda fun. I think it wouldn't actually be that hard to implement (provided we didn't want changes in vote frequency to be retroactive -- which I think is correct) but it would complicate things and it might get gamed in ways more harmful than what we have now (e.g., casting a lot of meaningless votes on random comments to increase the power of one's votes in the other direction).

Hm, I always figured that was to decrease the load on their servers by making pages more cacheable.

That would certainly prevent the situation where A downvotes 10 old comments from B every day (which is what's been happening to me lately). It wouldn't stop A downvoting every new comment from B as it arrives, though, and that's almost as bad.

That is, you're not supposed to upvote based on whether you agree with the conclusions. The same goes for downvotes, obviously: you shouldn't downvote articles or posts simply because you don't like the conclusions.

I'd guess you differ from a lot of LW here. I definitely disagree with what I've quoted...although I won't downvote you for that!

It's good to downvote comments that are flagrantly wrong or misleading, and to upvote cogent comments, and sometimes that's going to amount to downvoting because I disagree, or upvoting because I agree. Sometimes the most efficient way to handle a crappy comment is to hit it with a downvote and move on, rather than getting bogged down in an argument.

The downvote option does make it easier to be negative, but it also gives people an option in between ignoring trolls (and risking people thinking that other people don't have a problem with them) and engaging them (and rewarding them). It also lets people express disapproval of a post without wasting another post saying nothing but "I disagree". Of course, people still do downvote and then also post a comment that has no semantic content other than "I don't like you".

At a party, there are all sorts of feedback: smiles, laughs, nods, frowns, awkward silences, glares, etc. The upvote/downvote is a rough analog of that.

My first thought on reading this was of one person driven away from LW, Peter D. Jones by extensive downvoting. Reading his posts this was obviously a good thing. Enabling downvoting has driven away at least one person I really wish was still an active contributor, (wedrifid)[http://lesswrong.com/lw/jm7/open_thread_for_february_3_10/aj15/]. I think given that Hacker News doesn't have downvotes for stories but does for comments and employs hellbanning extensively I support the current system. Do you have any examples of good redditalikes without downvoting?

The buzzer would be annoying. Downvotes are just a signal people don't like what you wrote. Not equivalent.