There really should be a limit on the quantity of strong upvotes/downvotes one can deploy on comments to a particular post—perhaps both “within a specific amount of time” and “in total.” A voting group of ~half a dozen users should not be able to exert that much control over the karma distribution on a post. To be clear, I view (at least strong) targeted “downvoting [of] any progressive-valenced comments” as inconsistent with Forum voting norms.
At present, the only semi-practical fix would be for users on the other side of the debate to go back through the comments, guess which ones had been the targets of the voting group, and apply strong upvotes hoping to roughly neutralize the norm-breaking voting behavior of the voting group. Both the universe in which karma counts are corrupted by small voting groups and the universe in which karma counts are significantly determined by a clash between voting groups and self-appointed defenders seem really undesirable.
Thanks for the suggestion Jason! @JP Addison says that he forum-gated it at the time because he wanted to “see how it went over, whether they endorsed it on reflection. They previously wouldn’t have liked users treating votes as a scarce resource.” LW seems happy with how it’s gone, so we’ll go ahead and remove the forum-gating.
There really should be a limit on the quantity of strong upvotes/downvotes one can deploy on comments to a particular post—perhaps both “within a specific amount of time” and “in total.” A voting group of ~half a dozen users should not be able to exert that much control over the karma distribution on a post. To be clear, I view (at least strong) targeted “downvoting [of] any progressive-valenced comments” as inconsistent with Forum voting norms.
At present, the only semi-practical fix would be for users on the other side of the debate to go back through the comments, guess which ones had been the targets of the voting group, and apply strong upvotes hoping to roughly neutralize the norm-breaking voting behavior of the voting group. Both the universe in which karma counts are corrupted by small voting groups and the universe in which karma counts are significantly determined by a clash between voting groups and self-appointed defenders seem really undesirable.
We implemented this on LessWrong! (indeed based on some of my own bad experiences with threads like this on the EA Forum)
The EA Forum decided to forum gate the relevant changes, but on LW people would indeed be prevented from voting like I think voting is happening here: https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/commit/07e0754042f88e1bd002d68f5f2ab12f1f4d4908
Thanks for the suggestion Jason! @JP Addison says that he forum-gated it at the time because he wanted to “see how it went over, whether they endorsed it on reflection. They previously wouldn’t have liked users treating votes as a scarce resource.” LW seems happy with how it’s gone, so we’ll go ahead and remove the forum-gating.