Does this happen often enough for it to be a significant worry? I agree that this is a way the karma system could be abused, but what matters is whether it is in fact frequently abused in this way.
It’s not clear people would even know it’s an abuse of the system to strong downvote a post early on, rather than wait.
I don’t have access to data on this, but a few related anecdotes, although not directly instances of it.
This post itself was starting to pick up upvotes and then I think either received a bunch of downvotes or a strong downvote (or people removed upvotes), so I switched my regular upvote into a strong one. I think it went from 20-25 karma to 11-16. I’d guess this wouldn’t be enough to hide it from the front page, though, but if it had been hidden early on, I might not have made my comment starting this thread.
I’ve seen a few suffering-focused ethics-related comments get strong downvoted by users with substantial karma, in particular a few of my own comments on my shortform (some that I had shared on the 80,000 Hours website, and another in an SFE/NU FB group) and a comment about utilitarianism.net omitting discussion of negative utilitarianism. I’m not aware of this happening to posts, but I wouldn’t be surprised if such users would do the same to posts, including early on. These might have been 2 years ago by now, though.
Does this happen often enough for it to be a significant worry? I agree that this is a way the karma system could be abused, but what matters is whether it is in fact frequently abused in this way.
It’s not clear people would even know it’s an abuse of the system to strong downvote a post early on, rather than wait.
I don’t have access to data on this, but a few related anecdotes, although not directly instances of it.
This post itself was starting to pick up upvotes and then I think either received a bunch of downvotes or a strong downvote (or people removed upvotes), so I switched my regular upvote into a strong one. I think it went from 20-25 karma to 11-16. I’d guess this wouldn’t be enough to hide it from the front page, though, but if it had been hidden early on, I might not have made my comment starting this thread.
I’ve seen a few suffering-focused ethics-related comments get strong downvoted by users with substantial karma, in particular a few of my own comments on my shortform (some that I had shared on the 80,000 Hours website, and another in an SFE/NU FB group) and a comment about utilitarianism.net omitting discussion of negative utilitarianism. I’m not aware of this happening to posts, but I wouldn’t be surprised if such users would do the same to posts, including early on. These might have been 2 years ago by now, though.