[META] Retributive downvoting: Why?

I find it interesting that people do this. I'm going to use this as an opportunity to advocate doing the exact opposite: One thing I've found helps me listen to people more is when I'm having a disagreement with what someone else is saying over the course of a few posts, I go to their user page and find something that looks like it deserves an upvote and give it. This makes me much more willing to accept that the other person isn't being stupid, ignorant or otherwise just generally irrational on the point I disagree with them on.

Because LW is a multiplayer video game where you are winning when your team is getting more karma relative to the enemy player team. Whenever a video game is misdesigned to allow uninteresting grinding to contribute to winning, some people will do lots of uninteresting grinding to win.

An alternative would be to recognize that an upvote and a downvote are more orthogonal than opposite. A post or comment with 20 upvotes and 30 downvotes is clearly a very different post than one with 0 upvotes and 10 downvotes. A user with 2000 upvotes and 1500 downvotes is clearly a very different user than a user with 25 upvotes and 500 downvotes. If lesswrong simply reported upvote and downvote tallys side by side rather than netting them, a lot more information about posts, comments, and users would be available to readers. The current system is incapable of distinguishing between morons, trolls, intelligent newbies, and valuable and intelligent gadflies. Reporting positive and negative votes separately would help a lot.

<span class="votes " id="score_<? echo $comment["ID"] ; ?>">
<? echo $comment["up"] -  $comment["down"]  ?> point<? echo $comment["up"] -  $comment["down"]  != 1 ? 's' : ''; ?>
</span>

(
<span class="votes " id="score_up_<? echo $comment["ID"] ; ?>">
<? echo $comment["up"]  ?>
</span>
|
<span class="votes " id="score_down_<? echo $comment["ID"] ; ?>">
<? echo $comment["down"]  ?>
</span>
)

I want to point out that it is possible that some of these downvotes* could be honest assessments of a comment history. If a user notices you by reading one comment, that user might become interested in other comments you've written, and if this person didn't like one comment, he may also dislike other comments in which you express similar ideas.

* Which were not from me, because i have not read the conversation you linked to.

I say this because i realize that i have (arguably) done it before. I noticed a comment from one particular user which deserved to be downvoted. Then i read all the related conversations and downvoted the other comments in which that user repeated more or less the same thing. Then, i began reading earlier conversations in which that user had participated, and found that many of this user's comments were bad for similar reasons, but i did upvote about 10% of them that were good.

Overall, the user who had been downvoted saw a sudden karma drop within several minutes; they specifically made an accusation of retributive downvoting.

Long story short: on at least one occasion, a user who complained about mass downvoting was actually experiencing a rapid series of honest downvotes.

Someone spending their precious time going through someone's history to decrease their near-meaningless number as much as they possibly can is already losing. I hear about this happening so infrequently, and it's so totally inconsequential, that I don't think it merits thinking up/making changes to anything.

I've been retributively downvoted by one or two people over the past week and have lost about 110 karma. (Though I don't think I posted in the thread linked by the OP.) I agree that we need a system in place to correct and/or prevent abuses of the karma system.

At bare minimum, I think that LW should have a private log of users' up-vote/down-vote history accessible by the moderators. If someone complains of karma-assassination or the like, moderators could review the log and take appropriate action.

I think flagging for moderator attention is far superior to any automated response. I really like JoshuaZ's opposite approach, and I have no problem with someone repeatedly encountering a troll, and then going back and downvoting other trolling comments selectively. What I have a problem with is retributive downvoting without regard to the content of the comments being downvoted.

I'd be pretty happy to leave appropriate responses to moderator discussion. My suggestion would be something along the lines of undoing all downvotes that person made within the recent past (past week? moderator discretion seems appropriate), and removing their ability to downvote for some time into the future (a week or so?), long enough for them to cool off consider things from a different perspective. I would hope that the moderators would send a message explaining their action in such cases, even if it was only a description of what behavior was problematic and a boilerplate explanation of how mass downvotes hurt the site.

It is also very interesting to notice that the subject is charged enough to provoke this kind of behaviour. I don't think it has ever happened on a discussion about a technical fine point of some decision theory.

This evidence increase the probability I have on the hypothesis: "LW crowd has totally failed in raising his own sanity waterline, on average. There are people who undoubtably increased their own, but they are more than compensated by people who get even more irrational on a rationality forum."

Should have been a comment in the Open Thread.

I think it could certainly be wise to implement a limit on the rate at which one can downvote posts by a specific user, or, if that's technically difficult to implement, the rate at which one can downvote fullstop.

The more involved measures you suggest would require effort, but I suppose the question becomes: what is LessWrong for? If it's actively for improving rationality, such measures could be worthwhile, assuming we could find or reroute some moderators / mentors / monitors.

Not that I've ever bothered to do this, but you're not being very charitable. Maybe they just looked over someones entire comment history and decided that they'd like less of everything that person said. It doesn't seem abusive to repeatedly downvote clear trolls. Obviously, some people may disagree as to who the trolls are, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't punish those you think are.

As to 1: I have no idea whatsoever, but we clearly have a proof of existence. As to 2: this seems like the problem of strategic voting. We want people to up and down vote in a manner that reflects their true opinion of the comment, but the karma aggregation system incentivises voting in a manner that reflects the maximum exaggeration of their opinion of the poster.

I realized a generalization from recording up and down vote total separately is to have a few categories of vote. Perhaps a post could be voted "up" "down" "agree" "disagree" "troll". In a system like this, it would be troll votes rising above a relatively low threshold that would grey-out or hide posts and comments.

I think this is somewhat clunky compared to just reporting up and down separately. But I wanted to throw the idea out there for those who wish to think about this question.

I recently had a 30 point karma hit.

I have an idea I want to run past everyone. It occurs to me that you could just team up with any other poster at all to ask for a karma infusion.

For instance, let's say you just received a bunch of 20 retributive downvotes on comments, and you teamed up with me.

You could message me and say "Michaelos, I just received a bunch of retributive downvotes on my last 20 posts. Could you give me a 20 point karma infusion?" And then I come by and upvote 20 of your posts, and your karma is back to where it was.

Also, if I want to be helpful on more than just a karma level, if I do notice something that caused retributive downvoting, I should point that out while I am boosting your karma.

It seems to be the equivalent of asking your neighbor to help repaint your house after someone anonymously hit it with grafitti, except your neighbor can paint it in minutes.

Perhaps detecting a large number of downvotes to the same user? Just spitballing here.

I think the system on stackoverflow.com works well. There, making a downvote on somelne else costs you something in your vote total, whereas upvotes are free. The result is that genuinely wrong answers get a few net downvotes, presumably from very high karma individuals who don't mind the expense, and who also are presumably a good choice for "arbiter" type roles given their very high karma. stackoverflow.com karma system is pretty detailed, with priveleges and permissions coming at higher and higher personal karma levels, but I would say "charging" for downvotes is the most relevant feature for the most improvement here on lesswrong.com.

I'd try removing the voting buttons from the user page; the effort required to click the permalink should deter most of these serial downvoters.

Technical workaround:

Make it so that you cannot upvote/downvote from a user's comment history page. Or rather, show the vote as counting to the person pressing it but don't actually tally it.

EDIT: Ok, I see that the buttons have been taken off so this is irrelevant. In that case, new proposal: put the buttons back but make them do nothing. The majority of LW won't read this post and I think you'll be able to fool those who go to mass-downvote comment histories.

Insufficient elitism detected. Can we just ban idiots rather than have a clusterfuck of angst about edge cases and potential legit users falling through the cracks?

Simple technical fix: Remove downvoting from the system.

Going to downvote the main post and everyone who replied, as I do for most posts discussing karma. Karma is here for weak feedback and also as a weak anti-troll measure, don't sweat it, most forum veterans don't.

I have some related questions:

1. Why has this comment of mine been downvoted so much? Right now it's at -14! It's not that bad, is it?

2. Is there something I can do about it? What should I do differently, so that people don't downvote me so much? No-one left any reasons for their downvotes.