Call out post for a particular karma farmer on kbin.social
Call out post for a particular karma farmer on kbin.social
@pollodiabolo - this user is a karma whore of epic proportions and they have made a shit load (10-15+) accounts on kbin that boost and upvote each other while sometimes mass downvoting others that have posts trending towards the top - all to farm karma.
See top comment on this thread
You will continue to see me calling out this person and their alts. This can't and won't become another Reddit and karma whoring folks need to be called out and discouraged.
The following accounts are all the same person and in the very unlikely event they are not, they are still collectively vote manipulating.
@pollodiabolo @journalism_died @ishitwhite @muftiboy @kilkennygriffin @jeremyfurzen @syscollapse @riseupagainstthem @ruse @johnson_waters @cazzodicristo @at @the @Schluchtschiss @fuckoffyoudumbcunt @extremelybullish @cringeminge4 @NoCunteryForOldMen @yesbabyyy @kneel_pleb
A few of these accounts have since cleared their boosting history but with some common sense it should be easy to verify.
If I get mass downvoted, be sure to see the age of the accounts as well as whether they are on this list to gauge their authenticity. I am pretty sure this won't reach many but I'll spam it enough times so it eventually will.
EDIT: This is not a comprehensive list and there are obviously more alts. These are beyond a reasonable doubt involved in mass self-upvoting.
EDIT2: Almost every downvote I have on this post are by accounts that were made after I posted this. They all belong to the same user that I have called out here. This is pathetic and should be proof enough that vote manipulation is something we need to deal with.
EDIT3: More accounts to add to the list: @puny_human @latvianbloke @pedanticc @SONOFNAT
EDIT4: And now they've started to remove their downvotes from new accounts and add them from the list. Bruh I don't even get it at this point. I'm just gonna go to bed that person's a headache to figure out honestly. Night y'all.
Name and shame karma farmers.
EDIT5: This is an excellent example, you might see some familiar names
You seem to have struck a chord...
All three (make that 4) downvotes are from accounts younger than this post.
Some new accounts to add to the list:
...
Funny, I noticed latvianbloke downvoting an article on the Philly shooting where kids got hurt.
Yup bahahah, I already expected that. Those are rookie numbers - this person is on another level and there are a LOT more to come. I'd love to see how long they waste their life on this.
How many damn emails does this person have? Lmfao
No need, gmail gives you virtually infinite emails. Just tested it out, kbin doesn't have countermeasures against it in place. You can use one gmail email to create as many accounts as you want.
Same with @amnesiac7 who only posts US ragebait and seems to be an awkwardtheturtle account/sympathizer.
Dont let kbin turn into pic related
Edit: He blocked me, but dont worry I wont forget about you turtle. Good thing with the fediverse are multiple accounts.
This magic moment when while talking about "the adventures of awkwardtehturtle on reddit" we realized that he was among us, downvoting all our stuff. Someone pointed at the activity tab "hey guys, look!" and it was a reveal for us.
Nice catch! And would you look at the boosters of amnesiac7's trending post
This is crazy
Hey fuckface. Yes, I blocked you. No, I'm not turtle. Do you have some type of obsession with me?
kek
Interestingly enough, Turbostrider27 was my most down voted user there. I'm fairly certain that posts on r/Games were removed so they could post them and farm the karma. Turbostrider was also the only poster during r/Games pathetic attempt of a protest.
If you talked about it your post would get removed :) classic reddit mods
is it weird that i don't care? i don't care about oodles karma. 0 fucks to give. why do people care?
I do care because even though these virtual point mean fuck all, users will degrade everyone's experience to try and farm them. We'll be getting low quality, rage-bait inducing posts, reposts being boosted to the top and actual good content being overshadowed just because an arsehole wants bigger numbers
Dude is just some tool trying to play the same games he played on reddit. Deserves an IP ban if you ask me.
Well, when all your posts will start with a minus 5 and become invisible maybe you will start to care? Because you WILL have your haters too. Some people are that crazy.
all those accounts come back 404, maybe admins are on your side on this and took care of the issue.
Direct @ links don't seem to work currently. The accs still exist.
damn it chica you are all over this site (I liked a lot of the alt looks you posted and noticed it was all you), but your name if I open a new tab on it is golden, but all of theirs come back with the 404, but like @RheingoldRiver said it might be a bug related thing.
In that thread, I saw someone had an idea that maybe rep should cap off, like if you reach over say 5000, it would just display 5000+ or something and I thought that could be a decent solution. That would discourage people from posting with the goal of increasing rep, and encourage people to post just because they want to participate in the conversation.
I'm sure there are more elegant ways to deal with it, and perhaps we should have that discussion. The fact that you can give a post 3 upvotes (upvote = 1 boost = 2) makes it really easy for someone to rep-farm if they wanted too. Perhaps upvotes/boosts from accounts with the same IP shouldn't count toward rep?
I've seen many forums do tier rating systems for posters, so you didn't see any numbers but more of a generalized ranking from Novice to Veteran. The rank names shouldn't imply anything other than experience in posting, so avoid things like "Expert". It still gives some credence to a poster who has a high rank, but doesn't mean much beyond a flair. Much like Reddit trophies of account age...great, you've been here ten years, what did you do with it?
The argument then shifts to where the lines of rank are, but I don't think that's too important, although honestly if you can post for a month and become a Seasoned Veteran it might be too low. (Thinking of you, Frontier. Not every player should be Elite.)
The boost thing is something different. I like the idea of its supposed function, to push updated or valued content into the feeds more, but clearly the user manual needs work. Should we just have the same as everyone else with an up and down vote, where the upvote does a boost and counts towards rank, while a downvote is simply a visual of either disagreement or unfavorable content but doesn't do much (maybe drops the post lower but that's it).
Wow that kind of really bring back memories, I remember really enjoying that from the old forum days :) I think on the forums I frequented it was just based on the number of posts you have.
I agree, Internet points are just useless. The points should be useful in seeing the popularity of a given post or comment, but in judging a user's contribution? I dealt with trolls and assholes with 50-100k karma back in Reddit, it's not an indication of the quality of a user, just the amount of time they spent in popular subs posting popular content.
I figure the Internet points were useful to a certain point. Some subreddits were set to have a karma threshold that you needed to exceed before you could post. On one hand, if you were a new user who just signed up because you wanted to ask for help on that community, not great, but it probably? went a long way to keeping out low-effort bots that would spam a self-promotional link or scam link.
At least in the niche communities I occupied, upvotes went to helpful solutions or interesting discussion points, while downvotes helped make sure that comments with nothing productive to say (for example, just "kill yourself" with nothing else included), random off-topic comments, and incorrect solutions were collapsed by default instead of clearly visible for everyone to see and get annoyed or misled by.
Once I passed most subreddits' karma thresholds I stopped caring about how much karma I had in total. But it was also nice to see how many people liked, upvoted my comments and posts that I put effort into. Discounting posting on free karma subs when I still had like 20 karma and wanted to actually be allowed to post in subs instead of autoremoved, I never really did anything with the motive of gaining internet points and it still feels surreal that enough people did for this to be a common complaint about Reddit and a "how do we prevent it" discussion topic on kbin.
They aren't useless. They're worth a lot of money to the right person. This meme has repeated endlessly on reddit, all while there was an underground trade going on in verified, aged accounts with karma.
Right now on Kbin it may look like it's not important, but if Kbin grows and grows it's going to become a target for spammers, scammers, etc, and it's going to have to start to look for solutions on how to identify and restrict accounts. one of the simplest, and most obvious ways is the karma/rep system.
New account? Account with negative karma? May find it's rate restricted and posts are autohidden. Purchase an aged account with rep and you can at least spam for a bit until caught, then pay $5 for another account.
The problem is one of those evolutionary arms races, for a reason in your observation: if the points are useful in seeing the popularity of a given post or comment, then why not simply create a bunch of fake accounts to boost said post/comment (which is exactly what the OP was complaining about in the first place).
Individual karma ratings allow a weighting for upvotes so that, in theory, contributors who have a track record of constructive interaction can be the ones who have more influence on what rises to algorithmic prominence. But, of course, everything can be gamed, hence upvoting bot/sock puppet-rings like the one OP observed, or people buying accounts on reddit that had pre-established karma to let them astroturf away with impunity.
No idea what the long-term solution is, beyond the vague "build a community of known faces/names" which runs the opposite risk of turning cliquish or closed-off to new content. Or maybe abolishing all algorithms and just sorting everything by new (which brings us back to the ancient commenting issue of a whole chain of people saying "first!" rather than adding any meaningful observations).
Just cap each post at 5 rep. You can display more, but each post or comments only adds 5 to your total.
Encourages continued positive engagement, not just one popular post.That encourages low effort, but popular, spam.
If possible, I think the karma/rep score should be completely hidden. As long as people can see a number, they're going to try and game it somehow, which incentivizes low quality posts. You can cap total karma, but people will still try to grind up to 5000 and they'll still try to get the highest comment scores they can. That encourages people to make the types of low-effort posts and jokes that often clog up Reddit threads.
The other problem with an overall rep score is that it doesn't truly represent user behavior. If 1/3 of my posts are shitty troll posts, but the other 2/3 are generic low-effort joke posts and memes that people will upvote by default, my rep will stay positive even though I'm a net negative contributor. Likewise, if I make one really popular post that gets 90,000 upvotes, my score will stay positive pretty much forever, even if I troll and harass people nonstop.
So rather than report the sum of a user's post scores, I would propose displaying a "user quality" indicator based on the average score of their recent posts instead. For example, if your average is greater than 5, you'd get a green up arrow, and if your average is less than -5, you'd get a red down arrow, but otherwise you get a neutral icon. You could have other icons for higher and lower scores, but I feel like that might still encourage people to try to game the system, so I'd propose keeping it simple and making it easy enough to get the green icon that you're not incentivized to spend any time on it.
I really like that idea! A user's most recent behaviour is the most important to be able to judge at a glance.
Echoing this, that was an excellent suggestion by @Catch42. There should be capped karma and magazine specific karma.
That sounds AMAZING and I'd like to refine it a bit more. On reddit you could see karma breakdown by subreddit which was useful to see where people were most active. So what about:
- total karma up to say 5000 or so
- percent breakdown of total karma by magazine
So if you have say 10,000 karma from kbinMeta and 5000 karma from all other magazines combined it says like reputation: 5000+ and then breakdown: kbinMeta - 67%, askKbin - 10%, etc etc
Thanks for the shout out. It seems that the original thread was deleted, so I'll re-explain my idea here. The capped overall karma is to remove the incentive to grind for reputation points. There is fundamentally no point to them, but there is clearly some psychological need driving us to want more of them. This should help with karma farmers.
The magazine specific reputation points is so that people can tell when a troll has entered their specific magazine. A troll would have high overall reputation but in your magazine it would be very low, which allows for them to be quickly identified and banned.
@RheingoldRiver I like your idea of a percent breakdown, but it wouldn't help magazines identify spammers. A spammer can create an unlimited number of magazines with legitimate sounding names and spread out their grinding among them. The percent breakdown would look normal unless someone really dug into it.
What I don't have a solution for is creating an incentive structure that discourages shills from creating alt accounts in order to gain more influence.
I'm increasingly convinced that general reputation points should just go. They're not about reputation at all. They're about making social media more addictive.
Large positive scores are meaningless without knowing where they came from. And even then, they can be farmed. Same for large negative ones.
What do people actually use the score for? To determine whether some else is worth engaging with? 9 times out of 10, you can tell just from the post - people acting in bad faith are pretty easy to spot. If someone's being a prick, they can be ignored even if they're usually a level headed and nice person 99% of the time. If someone's JAQing off, or sea-lioning, they'll make it known in short order.
A number doesn't tell us what to do about it.
Breakdowns by group is a good idea. Maybe expand that idea to give a count of posts and comments by group, too. Not necessarily viewable by everyone, but at least by mods and admins.
You'll like this script I just made in response to this discussion then.. It removes reputation points from user's profiles as well as user profile popups, allowing you to navigate Kbin unbiased. You can toggle this on or off with a checkbox to the right of your profile.
Here come the downvotes - 4 downvotes, 3 of which are from accounts that were made after I posted this. What a loser lmfao I can't get over it this is fucking hilarious. This is pathetic and should be proof enough that vote manipulation is something we need to deal with.
What's dumb is reputation doesn't even do anything on Kbin right now other than make you go "haha I have higher number than you" so reputation farming is a total waste of time. Personally I hope it stays that way as it will deter the farmers, I can see some of the benefits of the karma system in Reddit but it's just too prone to manipulation to be actually useful in any way.
"haha I have higher number than you"
This is exactly what some people are after. It lets them believe they are oh so better for having no life outside of the internet. And content quality on kbin suffers in the process.
It must stay that way. High rep shouldn't affect anything at all.
It didn't do anything on reddit either as far as I'm aware, and yet people still went for it like they were trying to get the high score.
The only thing it did on Reddit was to limit who could join a subreddit or who could post something in a subreddit.
What do these people do with their fake internet points?
@xuxebiko buy NFTs, of course :)
LMFAO!
thanks, I needed that laugh.
I have not looked into the details, but this makes a solid case for public up/downvotes, it makes fuckery public.
Definitely. The public nature of voting means that it should be possible for anyone to write a bot that spots these patterns automatically.
Whether instance admins do anything about it is a separate matter, but at least everyone will know whether they're doing something about it.
That's not karma farming, that's straight up vote manipulation.
Absolutely. They are doing it with the intention of karma farming because they only post shitposts and useless Reddit crap like this, but this is a serious issue if they move on to opinion posts and politics.
As someone who uses Both kbin and lemmy I started removing my upvotes on lemmy because I thought did it by accident until I realized with lemmy it does that automatically when you post something making the default score 1 but on kbin it is 0 because it does not do that. Still the idea of upvoting yourself to get a higher point score just seems silly.