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.

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

You'll like this script I just made in response to this discussion then.. It removes reputation points from user's profiles as well as user profile popups, allowing you to navigate Kbin unbiased. You can toggle this on or off with a checkbox to the right of your profile.

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

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.

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).