Nikkei journal : Cold fusion in patent reproduce success in the United States, re-evaluation is accelerating

Quote from Eric Walker

BBCK777 wrote:
How about just giving Mary an automatic thumbs down?

This only makes the person doing the downvoting look petty, and draws sympathy for the person being mass downvoted, independent of one's opinions of their posts.

Downvoting (and upvoting) can be an important tool; however, when I block a user, I no longer see their posts directly and cannot downvote them without unblocked, going to the post to downvote it, which does seem petty to me. I would consider it if it were specifically requested. Short of blocking the user, I downvote posts that I consider positively harmful. I may or may not respond to them.

I have seen some of my posts tinted out where the relatively few downvotes were clearly kneejerk anti-Abd downvotes, the posts themselves had simply answered a question with fact. And they may stay tinted out if nobody upvotes. I recommend, if you see decent posts that are greyed out, upvote them! The rule is a net negative of two votes grays out the post. I consider this weak, by the way, because the post still takes up the full space! It simply makes it a little bit harder to read.

Quora uses a far more sophisticated system to determine the effects of downvoting (and downvotes on Quora are private, whereas upvotes are public). The algorithm considers what might be called the "reputation" of the user. I have decent reputation there and have seen a post be collapsed immediately when I downvoted it. (But maybe there were already other downvotes.) Collapse has a more drastic effect than here, it moves the post to the bottom of the page, to a separate section, and in questions with a high number of answers, collapsed posts can be almost impossible to read unless one already has a link to them. To pull a post from "collapse hell" can take substantial process and community support. Posts considered to violate policies, and so collapsed by Quora Moderation are much more difficult to pull out of collapse, sometimes almost impossible (even when the "policy violation" was a misidentification from overworked Quora Moderation). A decent post collapsed from downvotes is not so difficult to get uncollapsed.

Quote from Alan Smith

You could always assume 'The Lomax Position' and block Mary. Not many people know this, he has hardly ever mentioned it, but Abd blocks anyone who annoys him.

That is more or less correct, except that I mention it whenever I block a user. I'm not sure how many I have blocked; as far as I know there is no list that can be read for review. This is not exactly based on "annoyance," but rather on an assessment that reading and responding to a user is a waste of time. If someone else responds to the user, I will see this and may respond. There are some users whom I find annoying on occasion, whom I do not block, because they are, in my view, "contributing to the conversation."

I blocked Alan Smith, in fact, for a time. But he made a clearly useful comment, so I unblocked. Blocking is not an attack. It is simply exercising a right to turn away. I tell the user so that if the user wants to actually communicate with me, they will know that some special measures will be required. Most of the users I block, though, are allergic to what I write, let's put it that way.

Quote from Shane D.

Thank you. I never noticed Abd has blocked all but a handful here . Nor have I ever read that I could do the same with my tormentor of the past 5 years. Gosh, as I understand you, with just a click of the button HE is gone? No more insults, no more nightmares. Gosh, I have to think this through. Thx Alan.

He is not exactly gone, but you are then not tempted to defend yourself. This is counter-intuitive.

For "Ancient Wisdom" on this, see http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/DefendEachOther

We may imagine we have some duty to defend ourselves. We don't, unless we are, perhaps, literally sued.

There are also issues of damage to a community or community project, but these are best address by creating collective decision-making process -- which we do not actually have here, there is only ad hoc moderator action, and very occasional administrator action. If any. Was any action taken about https://www.lenr-forum.com/for…php/User/1799-Doris-Hody/ ?

See also this thread: The Playground et seq.

This is a blatant trolling account, formed as an attack on one user, not at all subtle, lying about "her" own identity. To me, it doesn't matter that the attacked user, Mary Yugo, is one I currently block. Such trolling increases polarization and conflict. It does not matter what "side" it is on.