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submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

@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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[-] [email protected] 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.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

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

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[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

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

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

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

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

They work if you left-click them, and not if you center-click them. I ticketed it last week. (on kbin)

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

yeah it seems to be that, if you @ someone that link comes back 404, but if you get them proper (from a comment or post) the page comes up. Thanks for pointing this out.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

That's not quite what I meant: Here is an @ link: @HorreC If you left-click it, so it opens in the same tab, it should work properly. But usually people don't want to do that when they open profiles, they want to center-click them so they save the original tab. Try center-clicking it; you'll get a 404.

It's a bizarre bug haha

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

ahhh, thank you for walking me thru that!

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[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

damn it chica you are all over this site (I liked a lot of the alt looks you posted and noticed it was all you), but your name if I open a new tab on it is golden, but all of theirs come back with the 404, but like @RheingoldRiver said it might be a bug related thing.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

I have not looked into the details, but this makes a solid case for public up/downvotes, it makes fuckery public.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

Definitely. The public nature of voting means that it should be possible for anyone to write a bot that spots these patterns automatically.

Whether instance admins do anything about it is a separate matter, but at least everyone will know whether they're doing something about it.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

Off topic but I just love your name/image so much!

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

Why thank you. :) It was a name I picked kind of randomly years ago when I decided to respond to a Reddit comment and needed to register an account, and I just happened to have seen the Endless Forest right beforehand. I never actually played it, though. It's since become my default online handle despite none of my interests being specifically oriented towards deer.

Then when I saw that Kbin/Lemmy allowed profile images I created a couple of potential avatars using Stable Diffusion and then cropped down my favourite.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

Well, it's magical! It reminds me slightly of the forest spirit in Princess Mononoke but way more striking. Strange how these things come into being.

I really need to get a proper avatar. I just grabbed the first thing I saw that was the right size from my image folder.

Edit: omg those images are all fantastic. You can have a whole FaceDeer empire.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

I was on the fence about the voting being public, some people may not wanna get shit for agreeing with one point or another was one point I saw (they may not feel they can vote freely) but it certainly does force accountability.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

What do these people do with their fake internet points?

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago
[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

LMFAO!

thanks, I needed that laugh.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

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

Link to comment

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

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

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

uh, at least in old.reddit with RES you can haha, it's in the upper-right-hand corner of your "profile" such as that is in old.reddit.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

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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[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

That's not karma farming, that's straight up vote manipulation.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

Absolutely. They are doing it with the intention of karma farming because they only post shitposts and useless Reddit crap like this, but this is a serious issue if they move on to opinion posts and politics.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

is it weird that i don't care? i don't care about oodles karma. 0 fucks to give. why do people care?

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

I do care because even though these virtual point mean fuck all, users will degrade everyone's experience to try and farm them. We'll be getting low quality, rage-bait inducing posts, reposts being boosted to the top and actual good content being overshadowed just because an arsehole wants bigger numbers

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

Well, when all your posts will start with a minus 5 and become invisible maybe you will start to care? Because you WILL have your haters too. Some people are that crazy.

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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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