What happened to user Vladimir Kalitvianski ?

Question

Every now and again, I like to go to a user's page to check what they've been up to for the past few weeks. One of these users was Vladimir Kalitvianski who is no longer listed as a user, and his posts have been all anonymized. What's the reason behind this?

Comments

He requested deletion because he thought someone spoke to him rudely. We gave him 32 hours to reconsider, but he only said "Yes, I'm certain" regarding the deletion. Here's the entry in the block log.

Answer 1

Vladimir Kalitvianski has requested his account to be deleted from the list of users of PhysicsOverflow twice.

After asking him if he is sure about wanting his account to be deleted, obtaining his prompt confirmation on his user wall, and giving him a waiting time of +24h to retract his request by deleting the account deletion requesting comments, the request was fullfilled and recorded in an answer to the public block log thread together with the corresponding evidence and context of the user request.

Comments

By deleting his account, his author reputation no longer appears, his papers are unlinked to anyone at all. This is a mockery of the review process--- if someone gets negative reviews, they just get peeved, ask to leave, and that's that? No more review of their work on the site? It also anonymized all his contributions, which makes it impossible to get accountability. He wrote them under his name, there is no reason to not leave them there. You can block the account to get the same effect as deletion.

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@RonMaimon all users who request their account to be removed are treated the same as you can see from the other answers in the public block log, there are other people who issued the same request. -1 for demanding that some users should be treated different and their requests of account deletion declined.

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All users should be treated the same: none of them should be blocked, and none of their names should be anonymized on any post.

Answer 2

He has asked his account to be deleted, after getting an official warning from Dilaton. His comments were singled out for rules violation--- namely being "off topic", and he received a lot of flak, including outright deletion of some comments.

(Not hiding, deletion, so that other mods can't restore the comment--- EDIT: turns out this was likely not the case, polarkernel says there were no deletions. EDIT2: Surprise! Despite Polarkernel's empty delete log, it actually was the case--- his comment " In Physics there are always doubts, ask better the conformist to stick to physics." was either edited down to an empty comment, which was then auto-erased so it wouldn't show up in the log, or else just outright deleted).

His response was to ask for his account to be deleted, which was immediately done, without discussion. I don't think this course of events is acceptable. The warnings that the discussion was "off topic" is a clear political censorship. Since I personally was under the impression that this politics is what this site was meant to avoid, this is somewhat heartbreaking, but not unexpected, given the events of some months ago.

The story here is essentially the same policy as anywhere, with different people on top. There's no "community moderation", there's moderation by arbitrary fiat, and official warnings, and official blocks. That's not what I signed up for. I have refrained from advertising the site further, and I think it's time to call the experiment a failure. You really can't trust anyone at all. I disagree with VK just as much. I would never censor him. I would have just moved his discussion to chat, if someone complained, and let it stay there indefinitely.

Comments

It's not as bad as I thought then. I thought the Mods had banned him from the site permanently, anonymizing him completely! The mods need to remove spammed comment, so I guess it's difficult to know what to do with those borderline cases where someone sees a comment as on-topic, another off. Perhaps comments should only be deleted if all the mods agree, and moved to chat if one mod, but not all, thinks the comments are becoming off-topic. I thought this had been discussed here a few months back.

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This is completely untrue. Vladmir's comments were not "deleted", exactly one comment was hidden. Vladimir did allege that they were deleted, but none of that is right.

It was very well decided in the past that 5 off-topic posts would get someone banned. Vladimir has posted a whopping 49 off-topic posts, and he hasn't gotten banned a single time - just one warning. So what are you even saying?

I have rebutted your arguments multiple times by email, it's unfortunate that you insist on continuing your propaganda against PhysicsOverflow.

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@anonymous I would have agreed, but in this case the discussion wasn't even a physics-related one, just Vladimir repeatedly saying "You're all fanatics" and randomly advertising his papers, with the others arguing why he's wrong. It was clearly off-topic, and borderline spam. No meaningful chat discussion could arise out of that.

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If the comments are totally worthless personal nonsense, then just hide them, They don't need to be there. The discussion was over it is justified to claim there is a Higgs without evidence, whether the evidence from LHC is sufficient to conclude that it is a SM-like Higgs, or something else which would match the data also. The "fanatical" was about those who conclude that the LHC saw the Higgs without reviewing evidence and considering other possibilities, and then it devolved into a name-calling fest, which was stupid on all sides. This stuff can be hidden, nobody would care very much, but the chat over how good the current evidence for the Higgs is would be mildly informative, even if it concluded after a few minutes with "it is completely conclusive", and even if it involved some digressions into name-calling along the way, so long as the evidence gets reviewed.

Answer 3

I am Vladimir Kalitvianski and I propose to stop this discussion. I am not that important for PO, so go ahead without me. I do not want to justify myself and I do not want to continue this quarrel either; it leads to nowhere.

Comments

This quarrel is not mainly about you, personally.

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You should have put this as a comment under my main question since this doesn't really answer my question.

I was just curious as to how the moderating system here deals with a knowledgeable research/graduate-level guy like you who is sincerely critical of main-stream physics, but posts comments that are seen as off-topic by some of the mods. From what I've seen, the system seems generally fair, but that's just my opinion ;)

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@physicsnewbie I think it's fine, as it's meta.

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He requested deletion because he thought someone spoke to him rudely.

No! I resigned to protest against a special practice introduced in my respect by Dilaton.

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Hi VK, I think we just reached a consensus that such official warning practice should be refrained to the minimal level. In any future case similar to yours, the comments might be moved to chat, and the pure name calling(on both sides) void of content will probably be hidden. Thank you for raising the attention, I think it has been helpful.

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@JiaYiyang: Anyway, I will not get back. I am a clear crackpot and Dilaton is clear defender of the site, so no.

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Hi VK, I'm grateful to you for raising awareness, but please understand I'm not sending you invitation to come back, I'm in no position to do that, since you requested to leave on your own behalf. You are certainly welcome to come back if you change your mind, well, at least a welcome from me.

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@VK No, there was no special practice. That was how the old policy worked, and a moderator warning someone by policy is just doing their duty.

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@dimension10: Was I complaining about warnings? Stop speaking on my behalf.

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@VK you did say "special practice". I can't interpret that in any other way.

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Erasing my posts and comments by Dilaton was factually blocking my participation without formally banning me. Very clever practice.

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@VK As I've said previously, your comments were not erased. Given your past history of lying about deletion of posts in your wall (when that is not even possible), I see no reason to believe you.

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@Dilaton @dimension10 @polarkernel: Dilaton, please tell the truth whether you erased (deleted without hiding) my comments and posts or not, and if yes, then under what pretext. Because dimension10 declares me a lier for a 100-th time. I can't stand it.

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Vladimir seems to be telling the truth about deletion, he showed me a screenshot of a comment which no longer appears, not hidden, just gone, in the reviews section, under "A Toy Model of Renormalization and Reformulation". This comment postdates all other comments there. I suspect similar deletions happened on a frequent basis, it's not like Vladimir took a screenshot of every comment he posted.

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The post was simply not deleted, screenshots can be faked, so can saved webpages. Can you post the screenshot he sent here? It could be the old one, when the anti-spam filter was active (he had sent me a screenshot then, too).

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Sure, here's the link. The final comment no longer appears:

Faking screenshots is total insanity, clearly nobody would do that. Is this the spam-filter deleted comment?

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This morning the "Meta" button disappeared from the main page menu for me: http://postimg.org/image/lsqlzbtx7/ I can still access certain posts on Meta via links that were sent to my e-mail (I activated the option "Email me if a comment is added after mine"). The original sreenshots are in the "bmp" format. For example, https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4Db4rFq72mLY0t6dEotYlRWODQ/view?usp=sharing (this my message disappeared after 1 minute of displaying. It was on 8 November 2014). I faked nothing. I hope the current message will pass the "filtering system".

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@Ron Thanks - that's the same old screenshot he had sent me months ago when the spam filter was active.

@VK Email admin at physicsoverflow dot org about the bug; it's probably a bug on your side, as I can see the link. I've tried with different browsers, logged out, and on different computers. I even tried on a virtual machine with a different OS (Ubuntu), just to be sure : )

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@dimension10: No, I cannot see Meta in Firefox and IE. Ask better polarkernel whether he did something for that. By the way, I can access Meta via Categories menu, but the shortcut on the main page disappeared this night.

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I repeat my request to Dilaton: @Dilaton @dimension10 @polarkernel: Dilaton, please tell the truth whether you erased (deleted without hiding) my comments and posts or not, and if yes, then under what pretext. Because dimension10 declares me a lier for a 100-th time. I can't stand it.

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@VK: It seems that there was no deletion of comments beyond the screenshot you posted, and that was an unfortunate bug that was fixed. Also, I didn't expect that you were showing me old sorted-out nonsense, that wasn't very honest on your part. I'm kinda disappointed. Also, I kind of look silly now. Thanks VK. (EDIT: @VK: thanks for posting the content of the recent deleted comment, finally. I understand now that the content deletion actually did happen.)

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It was honest because I explicitly wrote: it was in November! Read carefully my messages. You are too naive about all this business. Apart from personal actions of super-administrators, there are actions of anti-spam programs tuned in a "special way". There may be also bugs in the system, and it is always I who is a bad guy. I do not accept it.

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@VK: you need to be specific when claiming moderation abuse. Obviously there are people who won't like your stuff, you need to accept that when you challenge something 99% of physicists understand as second nature. People get harassed for less extreme contradiction of experts. I also get extremely irritated when I read your stuff. But dislike and abuse are two different things.

Is it possible one of your comments was edited down to delete an offending phrase? This is something we didn't discuss, and it violates the spirit of a rule we put in place--- that users have control over their own attributed texts, so that their content is not permanently altered without their permission. In this case, it should be a suggested edit, but comments don't allow edit history, so comment editing is special. The phrase that you say was deleted "physics does not allow for certainty ... etc " was not something that people don't know, and it probably annoyed you, but it's not like it was so important. But editing down user comments is something that is not particularly nice either, and it obviously shouldn't unilaterally be done by a moderator without asking permission from the poster.

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I also get extremely irritated when I read your stuff. But dislike and abuse are two different things.

@RonMaimon: Have you changed your mind since?

By the way, I understand people who reject my ideas and "claims". I encounter this all the time. But everybody must admit that we all have different background and professional achievements. We are not clones!

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@VK: I have not changed my mind on it being irritating, no, whenever you talk about renormalization it's like fingernails over a chalkboard to anyone brought up after 1974. But I understand the new mathematical idea there for rewriting the EM interaction more or less, and it is an interesting method for the production of soft radiation, or any other soft modes. I am not sure how new it is, it looks new, but there is a lot of literature on soft photon and soft Goldstone production, and I only read a tiny bit of that. Ultimately, I really don't care what your position is on anything, or how irritating it is to others, nobody must be silenced by power, you can just vote and move. Your stuff has nontrivial physics content regarding atomic-EM coupling, which is appropriate level and on topic for the site. All else is political nonsense.

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@RonMaimon: Thanks a lot for your answer, Ron.