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.

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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-of-metacarpi @johnson_waters @cazzodicristo @at-fieldu @the-big-lie @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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[–] minnieo@kbin.social 66 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (29 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.

[–] StopMassDownvotingYouIdiot@kbin.social 26 points 1 year ago (9 children)

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

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[–] Catch42@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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.

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!

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