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?
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
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.
Maybe have some mechanism to subscribe to "feeds" that rate users according to their own metric.
If I decide to trust @StopMassDownvotingYouIdiot's script or whatever that detects shennanigans like this, I can have its score or tag attached to a user. Could subscribe to multiple.
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.
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!
I've seen many forums do tier rating systems for posters, so you didn't see any numbers but more of a generalized ranking from Novice to Veteran. The rank names shouldn't imply anything other than experience in posting, so avoid things like "Expert". It still gives some credence to a poster who has a high rank, but doesn't mean much beyond a flair. Much like Reddit trophies of account age...great, you've been here ten years, what did you do with it?
The argument then shifts to where the lines of rank are, but I don't think that's too important, although honestly if you can post for a month and become a Seasoned Veteran it might be too low. (Thinking of you, Frontier. Not every player should be Elite.)
The boost thing is something different. I like the idea of its supposed function, to push updated or valued content into the feeds more, but clearly the user manual needs work. Should we just have the same as everyone else with an up and down vote, where the upvote does a boost and counts towards rank, while a downvote is simply a visual of either disagreement or unfavorable content but doesn't do much (maybe drops the post lower but that's it).
I like the sound of that. Something like Novice/Newcomer > Regular > Senior > Veteran > Seasoned or something. I also don't mind a sort of star ranking system that upvotes contribute to, but no numbers to strive for, only good contributions.
Wow that kind of really bring back memories, I remember really enjoying that from the old forum days :) I think on the forums I frequented it was just based on the number of posts you have.
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.
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).
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.
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.
They aren't useless. They're worth a lot of money to the right person. This meme has repeated endlessly on reddit, all while there was an underground trade going on in verified, aged accounts with karma.
Right now on Kbin it may look like it's not important, but if Kbin grows and grows it's going to become a target for spammers, scammers, etc, and it's going to have to start to look for solutions on how to identify and restrict accounts. one of the simplest, and most obvious ways is the karma/rep system.
New account? Account with negative karma? May find it's rate restricted and posts are autohidden. Purchase an aged account with rep and you can at least spam for a bit until caught, then pay $5 for another account.
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.
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.
I know right? I don't really care for them as a user, points are useful for posts and comments, as I said.
I liked the idea of having them up to a certain point, like 1k or 5k as mentioned. They'd be useful for the scenario as you mentioned.
I'm increasingly convinced that general reputation points should just go. They're not about reputation at all. They're about making social media more addictive.
Large positive scores are meaningless without knowing where they came from. And even then, they can be farmed. Same for large negative ones.
What do people actually use the score for? To determine whether some else is worth engaging with? 9 times out of 10, you can tell just from the post - people acting in bad faith are pretty easy to spot. If someone's being a prick, they can be ignored even if they're usually a level headed and nice person 99% of the time. If someone's JAQing off, or sea-lioning, they'll make it known in short order.
A number doesn't tell us what to do about it.
Breakdowns by group is a good idea. Maybe expand that idea to give a count of posts and comments by group, too. Not necessarily viewable by everyone, but at least by mods and admins.
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.
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.
Yup bahahah, I already expected that. Those are rookie numbers - this person is on another level and there are a LOT more to come. I'd love to see how long they waste their life on this.
This whole thread is an example of people who are very aware of what is possible with social engineering online and calling it out on a new platform in an attempt to at least slow the influx.
The person who is creating accounts like the energiser bunny hitting the skins is trying to use reddit tactics that have been well known since that crow vs corvid user was found boosting their content.
The difference here is that, since votes are public, their attempts are very transparent.
This is already being looked into. Kbin doesn’t have to form validation in place yet, but it’s on the list to prevent spammers.
Essentially it will prevent emails with plus signs and periods in them
You don't even need to do that. There are email providers that will allow you to make an unlimited number of email aliases that all point back to the same address. Fastmail is one that comes to mind, but I'm sure there are others.
No need, gmail gives you virtually infinite emails. Just tested it out, kbin doesn't have countermeasures against it in place. You can use one gmail email to create as many accounts as you want.
Checking "Hide Adult Content" doesn't actually seem like it blocks threads from nsfw magazines. When browsing threads by "newest", I definitely have multiple explicit pictures from explicit magazines (gfur, petplayyiff, & feralyiff?) I'm not subscribed to show up.
Yep, having this problem too. Just had NSFW magazines showing up in the Random list, plus still seeing porn showing up in search results. The "Hide Adult Content" box is definitely checked, and saved.
Both. I'm using the site on mobile and on desktop, not an app. My settings reflect that my default feed is set to Subscribed, but it gets reset to All whenever I go back to the home page, regardless of whether I change it to Subscribed from the home page or in the settings.
The boosts tab in my profile is filling with things I haven't boosted. I know I've mistakenly tapped on some buttons on mobile, but even unboosting things doesn't remove them. I tested with this thread by boosting and unboosting, and it's now permanently in my boosts tab. Even a comment I accidentally reduced and unreduced is in that tab. I don't understand why. I'm brand new to kbin so maybe I'm doing something wrong or unaware of something.
Same here; I change my mind about upvotes/downvotes all the time (especially since I have the terrible habit of voting while I'm still reading the comment), but the ones I've done that for are still there. Heck, the first couple I see when I look at my profile are ones I did that for. Read half the comment, upvoted out of the corner of my eye while I was still reading, read the second half, went "Hoo boy, nevermind," and un-voted.
Related to that, upvotes/downvotes being public is a dealbreaker for me. I don't feel safe upvoting or downvoting anything here unless it's completely uncontroversial, because I don't want to open myself up to harassment by people who disagree.
I'll hang around for a bit to see if that changes, but I'm very unlikely to stick around if it doesn't.
Yeah it was bothering me too but just to make people aware, someone else has reported it #47 and #152 a pr is waiting to be merged that looks to fix both issues..
I can't post but I can comment. It keeps giving me the error page. Other people seem to still be able to post on Kbin - anyone have any insight into this problem?
Was wondering what happened to your flood of posts. Guess the error is not local to me.
I just confirmed it's not just images I can't upload.
Even text threads do that thing where "We're Working On The Error" comes up and a phantom thread no one but you can see shows up on your profile.
As you say though, other threads origination on kbin.social are showing up so some posters are managing to get though?
Why are the default rate limits so low? As an admin how do I change them permanently? I have modified rate_limiters.yaml and ran the dump command. If the containers restart the file is reset to default settings.
Two things: imgur.com images do not open when I click the preview button. Thing two, we still really need a reply box at the top of threads not bottom. Posted from Galaxy s22 using Samsung Internet browser.
Can someone tell me why some instances aren't updating?
For example, https://kbin.social/m/manga@lemmy.ml only displays posts a week old but if you go directly to that instance, you can see posts posted a few hours ago.
I am also having this issue, federation seems almost completely broken right now. My Frontpage is entirely kbin magazines on both subscribed and all. My own posts don't federate well either, it takes hours for them to become visible on other instances and Mastodon.
Is it better for you now? I’m still in the same boat. My front page is full is mostly single digit comment stuff from Kbin. If I go to a lemmy app though, I will see more popular Kbin content on their front page than I am seeing while logged onto Kbin.
No no, not a problem at all anymore. I'm seeing all my subscribed Lemmy communities across a bunch of different instances in addition to a few posts from kbin magazines.
Kbin's algorithm definitely switches content out faster than Lemmy's though, could that be what you're describing?
My subscribed looks alright for the most part (even though I am getting stuff I did not subscribe to), but I also want to keep discovering new magazines/communities, so I go to “All” a lot. You may be describing what I see though in terms of how kbin sorts through content on All. It just makes Kbin look really empty to me compared to Lemmy. It’s rare that I will see something with hundreds of comments on my front All page.
I've been trying to set up my own kbin instance but without success. Is there a way to diable SSL? I'm running the instance on a raspberry pi at home behind a reverse proxy which already handles all the certificates for https. This already works great for my mastodon instance.
I tried installing the docker container and also manually but both times it expects https instead of simple http and I can't seem to find the place to change this. There's no mention of SSL in the nginx configuration file and I don't really have any experience with docker and where to change the configuration in such a container.
Weirdly enough, the manual installation seems now to work (the website is reachable) but kbin shows me a server error 500 for every site. I don't have mercure installed because I couldn't figure out how (it isn't mentioned in the kbin doc and the mercure website is not really helpful), could that be the problem?
Has anyone tried creating a KBIN server using the Docker instructions since Saturday? I got a development server running on Saturday and I decided to bring up a production ready version on Sunday, but now I'm running into two errors while creating it.
I have tried creating an instance on both Debian 11 and Ubuntu 22.04 with both Docker and the manual steps.
I can get the build to work fine. But at best I get 500 errors with no signs of logs as to why, not in postgres, not in nginx, not in redis or rabbitmq or even syslog.
On Docker i have both the kbin_messenger and kbin container boot looping with an error about creating cache directories. But since the containers are restarting I cant even get into bash on them to see why.
I finally said fuck it and ran the compose for "prod" and the containers start but again, 500 errors.
At this point....i give up i feel. I would love to host an instance and I am familiar with some of these modules (ie: NGINX, redis and postgres) but with how this is built, I dont see where the breakpoint is.
I operate my own homelab and have a background in SRE, so I figured I'd try out the same. I've wrangled a Mastodon instance install before, so this couldn't be too hard, right?
My approach started by using containers via lxc as a quick and dirty way of getting a development environment that enabled me to figure out if it worked and then see if I could then wrap it into a proper docker container and look at potentially publishing that.
On my first attempt, I did the manual route. I skipped the redis, rabbitmq, and postgres installs as I already operate those elsewhere on the network, but I got everything else running. Unfortunately, I also experienced the 500 errors. Most of the front page loaded, except for the content where the 500 error was displayed. Even with some digging around, I couldn't find a clear path to figuring out what was causing the 500 error, as the Mercure hub was seeing subscribers connect and disconnect. Gave up.
I then figured maybe the docker route might be easier/streamlined. I'm not a fan of duplicating services, but I thought that if the core workflow was solid enough, I could put effort into splitting them apart and go from there. Unfortunately, I don't even get past the docker-compose build for dev. Docker compose hangs forever.
Yeah. Kbin install made me eat some humble pie for sure. I think someone called me a normie in a lemmy thread describing my troubles. Lol.
To be fair some of the parts like mercure and rabbitmq im unfamiliar with. But it was a stone cold stumper for me and that’s rare. I’m fairly familiar with Linux admin, and even some of the tooling like docker. But I just couldn’t get it to work in a cohesive way. I ran plenty of Linux servers from Drupal instances, Postgres, nginx for all sorts of shit, etc etc.
My lemmy instance took….45 minutes to roll out. Though I already had an Ansible box sitting in my lab.
I am not enjoying kbin.social right now. The latency is beyond atrocious, at 10+ seconds to load each page. The UI reminds me of 2004 forums that don’t know how users work. The mobile UI is just the worst.
Some pain points:
I’m a software engineer so I can figure this shit out, but how the hell do I subscribe to a magazine? If I go to it, there should be a “subscribe” or context menu at the top to subscribe/favorite/mute. (I found it, but it's so weird on mobile to click the logo then scroll to get to the subscribe.)
Why is the comment box all the way at the bottom? Where’s the “add comment” button on a post?
Why are comments paginated like a forum? Why not just a “load more” like Reddit? What’s the point? It's not to decrease the response because you can do that with "load more" buttons.
Selecting the comment box should NOT zoom slightly into the page. The mobile web UI needs a lot of work from people who know how to do mobile UIs.
Is there no “homepage” button? Clicking the Kbin logo at the top just brings up a menu, which requires another click on the homepage button to get back. This is weird and unintuitive.
Edit: And you can't collapse comment threads? What even...
I really want a Reddit replacement, but this is not it with this terrible UI.
if you're a software engineer you should had known to make constructive comments and also most importantly realise that you are on a Non-commercial open source one-man-project. Your attitude is disgusting and you sound like the guys that nobody wants to work with. Nobody forces you to be here and you're welcome to go and please take your cancer with you on your way out.
Add issues to the codeberg.
RN there are users scripts and userstyles over at m/kbinStyles to add collapsing and move text box to the top. Users are already adding requests for these functions natively. The infinite scroll rather than pages is available in the gear icon on the side or in your profile
kbinMeta
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.