As we start to see more users join, it’s inevitable to see trolls (especially low-effort trolls) making more of an appearance and trying to be controversial and noticed.
Best just to scroll past them. They want to spark unwinnable arguments and rack up negative rep. If something seems absurdly ridiculous or inciteful, just move on. It’s not even worth down voting.
But also, remember not to automatically assume someone with negative reputation is a troll. Given kbin currently doesn’t calculate reputation correctly (it counts boosts not upvotes).
I’m putting this as a top level comment, but I mean to be talking here to the people suggesting to report or block, or moderators looking at this and thinking of taking action against trolls.
Doesn’t matter. For one person like you there are 20 other who will just spam/downvote.
Sure it matters.
It also counts downvotes, oddly though. So someone with lots of upvotes but a couple of downvotes will still end up in the negatives.
I generally assume good intent, but also with the question: “Does this reply contribute to the conversation?” If not, then generally it’s safe to call it a troll. Especially if it reads to elicit a negative response.
It’s the QI scoring method. (QI being a British quiz where players often end up with negative scores.)
Everything is made up and the points don’t matter.
Works pretty well for “fake internet points” as well :)
Yup, I’ve got significantly more upvotes than downvote in total (only one reply of mine so far got downvotes, from the bigots it was calling out), but my overall score is still negative at the moment. Which I personally don’t really care about, I just wouldn’t want others assuming I’m a troll because of it.
Edit: looks like these last few replies got me off that negative rep lol, thanks
(I don’t have the brain power to figure out any thing of any significance from this but if anyone is interested: 20 upvotes on replies today got me from -3 to +1)
Edit again: though having now posted an article from an indigenous perspective on a Canada day celebration post, I am already worse off from when I started lmfao
If you’re using kbin, the reputation is calculated between your boosts and downvotes. This is a flaw from how this instance tried to retool the platform, but will be rectified soon so that reputation will be the simple arithmetic of upvotes minus downvotes.
In other instances, the upvotes are called boosts, but here on kbin, the functionally of boosts is how your content is getting promoted in other instances, from what I understand. Boosts are like retweets on other users’ activity feeds here in kbin.
As mentioned, this will be ironed out.
Yeah, I figured it was something to do with that from bits I’ve seen in other posts, but thanks for the clear explanation!
Honestly, I don’t think we should bother checking their reputation score even if it was working correctly. They’re either engaging in shitty behaviour or they’re not. All of us engage in shitty behaviour sometimes - we all get hangry, we all have bad days, and we’re all suffering in some way or another - and the fact that someone has a record of saying popular things doesn’t mean their shitty behaviour needs to be accepted or engaged with.
Call it out, ignore it, or report them. If there’s a pattern of shitty behaviour, the mods or admins can have a chat with them about it.
Of course, I agree with that. But there are people who do that, so I figured it’s important to mention still.