a few high-karma users are much more intense about it and don’t hesitate to throw their weight around. These users can then have a wildly disproportionate effect on discourse because if their vote is worth, say, 7 points, their opinion on one piece of content vs. another can be and often is worth a full 14 points.
It would be interesting to get peoples guesses/hypothesis of this specific behavior, then see how often it actually occurs.
Personally, my guess is that EA forum accounts with large karma don’t often do this behavior “negatively” (they rarely strong downvote and and negatively comment). When this does happen, I expect to find this to be positive and reasonable.
In case anyone is interested, my activity referred to above, begun almost half a year ago, provides data to identify instances of the behavior mentioned by IanDavidMoss, and other potentially interesting temporal patterns of voting and commenting. There are several other interesting things that can examined too.
I would be willing to share this data, as well as provide various kinds of technical assistance to people working on any principled technical project[1] related to the forum or relevant data.
It would be interesting to get peoples guesses/hypothesis of this specific behavior, then see how often it actually occurs.
Personally, my guess is that EA forum accounts with large karma don’t often do this behavior “negatively” (they rarely strong downvote and and negatively comment). When this does happen, I expect to find this to be positive and reasonable.
In case anyone is interested, my activity referred to above, begun almost half a year ago, provides data to identify instances of the behavior mentioned by IanDavidMoss, and other potentially interesting temporal patterns of voting and commenting. There are several other interesting things that can examined too.
I would be willing to share this data, as well as provide various kinds of technical assistance to people working on any principled technical project[1] related to the forum or relevant data.
I do not currently expect to personally work on an EA associated project related to the forum or accept EA funding to do so.