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

That encourages low effort, but popular, spam.

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.

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

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).

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.