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.
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.