@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.
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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
Echoing this, that was an excellent suggestion by @Catch42. There should be capped karma and magazine specific karma.
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.
Cheers. This idea definitely has merit and honestly should have its own thread. I’d encourage you to make one on kbinMeta, spark a discussion and tag ernest to see if he would be willing to get rid of the existing system in favor of this. He is very open to community feedback in my experience so hey, might actually get it implemented!
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
On reddit you could see karma breakdown by subreddit which was useful to see where people were most active.
I’d argue that doesn’t really tell you where somebody is active. Most of my karma on Reddit was because I made literally one popular comment in a default subreddit. I could make a thousand comments elsewhere that would never see that kind of traction. You might get the impression that I was really into that subreddit even though I just saw it on /r/all and made a drive-by comment that struck a nerve.
I don’t know that this is really a problem as such. Maybe people shouldn’t care if other users get the wrong impression about which communities they’re interested in, but ultimately where you make your reputation is probably more a function of where you’re speaking to the largest audience. Unless you’re avoiding larger communities completely, basically everybody will get most of their reputation from posts to the largest, most-visible communities rather than the smaller places where they may be spending as much or more time.
On reddit you could see karma breakdown by subreddit which was useful to see where people were most active
You can? I have never paid attention to karma I had no idea. I thought that’s just something that mods see to help them moderate.
This all seems needlessly complicated, and worse, it is custom-tweaked to just one specific scenario. I would much rather simply have the details of who voted for whom remain public and then allow each instance to handle that however they wish.
Spotting karma whores who operate like this, with a group of mutually-upvoting and downvoting bots, will be a trivial pattern for automatic detection. Rather than simply trying to give them an ever-more-complicated “game” to play, just identify them and block them and be done with it. Admins won’t want their instances to become known as havens for such behaviour so they’ll likely wipe users like that.
Maybe have some mechanism to subscribe to “feeds” that rate users according to their own metric.
If I decide to trust @StopMassDownvotingYouIdiot’s script or whatever that detects shennanigans like this, I can have its score or tag attached to a user. Could subscribe to multiple.
