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.
I would like to see subdomains for communities here. like @competitive.kbin.social for lots of sport-like things as an example. Also place (city, state, country) and fandom or other stuff like that. And make it easy for people to block that subdomain with allowances for the things they actually want to see (though I guess if it's still accessible by subscriptions or directly going there, that works too).
Is anyone else still seeing federated posts even when you turn the federation status to off? I was trying to hide some of the excess meme posts that are coming from other servers. But turning off federation does not make all of them go away. Some federated posts are still being shown.
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.
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.
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
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 you could make a small amount of money for selling a reddit account with high karma...but that's the only thing I ever heard of it being useful for.
It also grants a small amount of credibility of not being some random new account shill or whatever, but given how accounts can be sold, it doesn't really do that if you're paying any attention
That's a fair point, I forgot that was a thing that could be done. Was that useful? Do you think it's something that should be possible here in the future?
As someone who was mostly a lurker on Reddit, it was really annoying, actually. The rare times I wanted to comment on something, only to be hit with being told my karma was too low, so I couldn’t? It put me off those subreddits fast and ended up made me less likely to try to comment on things.
This is exactly what some people are after. It lets them believe they are oh so better for having no life outside of the internet. And content quality on kbin suffers in the process.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And now they've started to remove their downvotes. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think we should be discussing and commenting on what we think is most important about this space.
One of the biggest tensions is going to be that as a community grows, it's going to attract the attention of (a) advertisers who will develop "organic marketing" campaigns, (b) political messaging campaigners for international as well as domestic concerns, and (c) "influencers" who want to market their brands. Each of these will use high-engagement ragebait and awwThatsAmazing-type posts. Reddit's r/all was full of these.
Kbin and lemmy seem nice and refreshing because a lot of those posts don't exist here yet. But if we continue to grow, they will show up. How will we handle this?
That’s one trend I hope doesn’t spring up over here. I hated the fact that 95% of the subs on /r/all were literally the same thing. Like, what was the difference between MadeMeSmile, DamnThatsInteresting, NextFuckingLevel? Just all the same clickbait trash, and then, as you say, some “organic” marketing campaign for the latest Marvel movie.
Edit:
Mastodon handles this by not having an algorithm. In order for a toot to gain traction, it actually needs to be boosted around so that people can see it. A great example of how this prevented “organic” marketing was with @Raspberry_Pi.
When they first joined, their SNS team tried the same easy brand tactics that they used on Twitter, trying to force engagement. It had the opposite effect, and the community backlash was fierce. They have since changed their messaging and become more genuine.
Since link aggregators usually need some kind of algorithm for a “front page,” I think the most important thing is to have it be transparent and static. No changing it every 4 months to increase engagement.
Most importantly, the community should also have a shared opinion on what kind of stuff they are okay with, and this can be more localized per instance.
Recently, I've visited r/all out of curiosity. Prior to deleting my Reddit account I can't remember the last time I had visited r/all. I was always on my home page, and r/all didn't even enter into my sphere. I would only catch brief glimpses of it as my home page loaded (I don't know if this is because I used RES or not). My wife and I would talk back and forth about things we'd see on Reddit, and they were vastly different experiences.
Considering the minimal content so far on kbin, I do peruse "all" frequently, however my default viewing is on subscription. I don't know how many users defaulted their home page to r/all on Reddit, but my wife and I did not. It seems to matter on how you curate your own experience. I'm glad these choices exist on kbin.
Reddit also had an aggressive recommendation system, where posts from your most recently interacted subs would show up more often. I would literally only open one sub via a post on the front page and the next time my /all would be filled with trash for that sub.
I used rif and I took the approach of blocking subs and using the front page rather than subscribing to specific subs. I don't think the algorithm worked through that app since it relied on the developers API key to load content.
I would get a lot of niche content showing up without a lot of the annoying subs spam.
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.
The version you've installed is the PWA (Progressive Web App). It's effectively just a stripped-down browser window that loads the mobile site in its own dedicated "app" on your device, even though it's technically just a separate Chrome window.
For a lot of users, this may be all they need. But because it's just the mobile web page, you won't get any extra features that you might find with a dedicated app (like notifications or custom UI elements).
This, the app is just a webpage that doesn't appear like one. Though I have to say that it is good for the time being (until some better app gets done)
kbinMeta
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.