this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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@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

Image in case they decide to retract their votes again

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[–] princessofcute@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (7 children)

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.

[–] atocci@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (4 children)

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.

[–] princessofcute@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It was sometimes used for posting, like you had to have a certain amount of karma to post in certain subs

[–] atocci@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That's a fair point, I forgot that was a thing that could be done. Was that useful? Do you think it's something that should be possible here in the future?

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[–] minnieo@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago

It must stay that way. High rep shouldn't affect anything at all.

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[–] Gamers_Mate@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] minnieo@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (12 children)

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?

EDIT: I made a script that removes user reputation from their profile, and the profile popups upon hovering usernames. Sitewide removal. Navigate Kbin unbiased.

[–] Hello_there@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Kichae@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago

That encourages low effort, but popular, spam.

[–] nefarious@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] StopMassDownvotingYouIdiot@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Echoing this, that was an excellent suggestion by @Catch42. There should be capped karma and magazine specific karma.

Link to comment

[–] Catch42@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] RheingoldRiver@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] vaguerant@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] Niello@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] HidingCat@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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.

[–] DreamyDolphin@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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).

[–] PabloDiscobar@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago

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).

Exactly, creating accounts doesn't stop them. If a user has leverage on the editorial content of kbin, then they will multiply the accounts.

I fled reddit because stupid stuff was upvoted for popularity. If we allow the same vote system we will have the same problem here. The trolls have already learned the behavior on reddit, they are just surprised to see that their votes are public on kbin. But the underlying problem is still here.

My preference goes to "no vote" system and just rely on the report button, but it's a complicated problem for sure. What helps us is that the population of an instance is not unlimited, like on reddit. We can use that.

[–] HidingCat@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago

Firstly, I'd say don't let perfect be the enemy of good; there may not be a perfect system, but Reddit back when I used it was pretty good 80% of the time, until you got to the big memey subs. There's an additional bonus here, in that activity can be seen. At first I was a little apprehensive but now I think I'm on board with it, so sock puppets can be tracked.

I don't think individual karma ratings should be used to weigh up votes across the board, because simply put, a user shouldn't have a bigger influence just because they got more Internet points.

I think the basic premise of all this up voting and down voting should be that it's a form of crowd sourced moderating. Users letting other users know what was interesting and what was detrimental to the conversation. I've seen proposals like giving votes more context (eg a funny vote, like Steam reviews and Ars Technica's forums), so that might help shape the quality of the crowdsourced opinions.

[–] Elevator7008@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] StopMassDownvotingYouIdiot@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] HorreC@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

all those accounts come back 404, maybe admins are on your side on this and took care of the issue.

[–] minnieo@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (6 children)

Direct @ links don't seem to work currently. The accs still exist.

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[–] xuxebiko@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

What do these people do with their fake internet points?

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