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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I think it would be useful to change Reputation points into two words "Positive" if > 0 and "Negative" if < 0 and leave it at that.
There's really no need to keep the points because it only feeds stupid behavior like this.
It's gamification of discussions in a place that doesn't need it - we're not hungry for MAU stats, no one cares about MAU because we don't have venture capitalists funding the service.
Get rid of Reputation points.
Use upvote/downvotes solely for page/thread sorting purposes.
Just like Mastodon has done some design choices (like not allowing re-posting with quotes), I think the threadiverse needs to have similar thoughts about the posting culture we want to cultivate.
I think karma should only be visible on posts and not on people's profiles. The usability factor un voting ideas, topics and threads is great. Highly valuable feature.
Karma for users? Useless. It creates a sense of popularity contest, and it's everything that's wrong with social media.
Let's give merits or demerits to ideas, opinions and topics of discussion and let's take the Ego element out of the equation
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.
We should seriously consider removing the upvote/downvote system completely. As discussed here, the system is too easy to abuse for bots and crazy people. Already now I have my own mass downvoters, you will have yours too sooner or later.
Simple solution: Eliminate karma points/reputation points/likes/dislikes, all of it. People are going to find a way to game the system as long as there's a system to game.