Prevent retributive serial downvoting

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What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Pick someone you don't like
2. Downvote every article and comment they've ever posted
3. (if desired) Make a new account and repeat

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

Expected output: Some kind of notice that you appear to be gaming the karma 
system for retributive purposes, rather than contributing to the site.

Instead: The system silently accepts your downvotes.

What version of which web browser are you using? On what operating system?

Please provide any additional information below.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by brent.j....@gmail.com on 27 Nov 2012 at 12:50

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Eliezer, do you have a preferred mechanism for dealing with this? (Asking you 
because you tend to want to have a say in LW code changes.)

Original comment by lukep...@gmail.com on 26 Jun 2013 at 12:12

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I'd as soon silently reject the downvotes and notify a moderator, who could 
then either approve, or remove downvoting ability (still with silent rejection) 
but that would be way more complicated.  As it stands, just vanishing the 
downvoting buttons on that user after -10 karma in 1 day sounds reasonable.  We 
also want to allow this when the downvoter has more than 1000 karma and the 
user has less than 70% upvotes, maybe - there are such things as trolls.

Original comment by yudkow...@gmail.com on 26 Jun 2013 at 5:00

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One objection to this: in my case, for example, I came to the attention of 
someone very quickly in my career at LW, and they have made sure to keep me 
below 68% upvotes consistently.

If I may be so bold, I think the proper solution is to record the name and 
timestamp of upvotes/downvotes with the upvote/downvote itself, and signal a 
flag to a moderator if more than, say, 50% of a person's dkarma/dt within a 
particular span of time comes from a particular person. Put in a threshold so 
that low-karma edge cases don't trip false positives, and have the moderator 
review all karma to see if someone is either downvoting retributively, or 
upvoting collusively. 

Original comment by brent.j....@gmail.com on 8 Jul 2013 at 7:42

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If we use fairly tight criteria for when to notify a moderator, it won't take 
that much time on their part. It would also be helpful if whatever bug fix we 
use also works retroactively so the moderators can see what has been happening 
up until this point, but that's not strictly speaking necessary. 

I don't think that using the downvote's curent karma total is a good idea as a 
standard. In practice almost any serious block downvoting will occur from users 
with some karma anyways. 

Original comment by zelin...@gmail.com on 10 Dec 2013 at 4:04

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This has just happened to me (Jiro).  I tried to private message Eliezer but he 
didn't respond--he's probably swamped with responses to all the stuff he writes.

I went down by 50 karma in a week or so and the damage is only this light 
because every so often I beg and other people mod some of my recent comments up 
again.  Checking my comments shows that of the past 100 comments I've made, 
exactly one was not downvoted, which is not only extreme, it clearly indicates 
a downvote by exactly one person, since the same number of downvotes made by 
multiple people would be distributed in a more random manner.  Statistically 
speaking, distributing 100 random down votes should result in about 35 comments 
that don't get any downvotes (of course that's a simplification, since there 
are also legitimately downvoted comments, and upvotes, and it's not always 
possible to exactly determine the number of votes from the count without a lot 
of work).

At the rate I'm losing karma, I will be forced out of LW by August (if the 
downvoter bothers to create extra accounts to continue downvoting at the same 
pace).

And it's not fast enough for the downvoter to be discouraged by only voting 
down -10 per day.  It's only averaged around that on me.

Also, I've already been taken below 70% by this, so basing it on whether the 
victim is below 70% is not good.

The simplest fix would be to show the names of everyone who downvotes you.  
Anyone who finds that 99 comments out of 100 have the same person's name listed 
as a downvoter could easily expose them.

Original comment by jmusas...@gmail.com on 20 Mar 2014 at 2:33

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I'm now down to 515 karma, having started with 605.

The moderators are being seriously amiss in refusing to look at this or do 
anything about it.

Original comment by jmusas...@gmail.com on 3 Apr 2014 at 1:41

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Original comment by wjmo...@gmail.com on 3 Apr 2014 at 9:37

• Changed state: Accepted

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One user responsible for systematic downvoting 
[http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/kfq/moderator_action_eugine_nier_is_now_ba
nned_for/ seems to have been caught], though there are still 
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/kfn/moderators_please_wake_up_and_start_protecting/b26e
 no tools] in LW's interface that would simplify solving similar problems in 
the future. Not clear if the attack on user MugaSofer reported in issue 382 was 
investigated.

Original comment by robot...@gmail.com on 3 Jul 2014 at 12:34

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Apparently, it's not currently hard for Trike to investigate particular cases, 
so posting the quote here for future reference:

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/kbk/meta_policy_for_dealing_with_users/

"For future reference, it's very easy for Trike to look at who downvoted 
someone's account, so if you get questions about downvoting in the future I can 
run the same report." -- Jack from Trike aka user jackk on LW 
http://lesswrong.com/user/jackk/

Original comment by robot...@gmail.com on 3 Jul 2014 at 12:43