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Karma Bots
Posted as directed by @amix... It's beome apparent over the past couple of days that @martinbogo is running a bot to avoid losing karma for inactivity. Only immediate action by the A-Team to put a stop to this dishonest practise and to strip @martinbogo of karma earned by this practise (and award karma penalties that would otherwise have been assessed) will preserve Plurk's reputation. Anything less than that is blatant disrespect for all the honest plurkers who routinely suffer karma loss because of inactivity.
I’m concerned that the seriousness of this problem won't be realized.
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people have this problem
I have this problem, too!
Tell me when someone solves it.
The more people who report this problem, the more it gets noticed.
The more people who report this problem, the more it gets noticed.
The company believes this isn't a problem.
The best solution from the company
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Users that run bots will loose followers and friends. This will be their penalty.
And if you are tired of it, then unfriend / unfollow the offender.
The company says
this solves the problem
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Inappropriate?Is Karma really something that people feel the need to lie and cheat to get??? this makes no sense to me, and honestly I think would bring bad karma on RL. I say strip them of their points.
I’m frustrated
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Inappropriate?There's a difference between @martinbogo and @williamshakespeare. Some bots are loved, and some are despised. Let their friends vote by unfriending. (Utilizing a sort of RL karma.) We'd hate to lose the bots we love just because of some losers.
For example, I'm not friends with, nor following @martinbogo. Tada!
I’m happy
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This solves the problem
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Instead of bringing @williamshakespeare into it, I should have just said that content should be king. My apologies, Bard. -
My lord, there needs no such apology
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Inappropriate?Frankly, I think the karma algo is the problem, not the bots. It is not practical to expect people to post in every karma period. I personally don't worry about karma, but if it is an annoyance, I can't understand why the dev team insists on maintaining it in such a manner.
It seems like such a juvenile concept to have to "punish" your active users. They are destroying any good will they garner with their great interface. Several of my friends on other SNs have quit Plurk and they tell me that karma was the primary reason. I can't understand it, but that is their decision.
I’m confused
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i agree. karma is a misfeature with more downsides than upsides.
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Inappropriate?lchamp: unlike too many others, you have shown some respect for the many users who do think that karma is an important issue. thank you for that. I agree with you that it doesn't make any sense why the A-Team continues to implement the karma algorithm as it is and upset so many users. And I think that their continued failure to respond to so many of these kinds of identified problems here on getSatisfaction demonstrates a disdain for their users. -
Inappropriate?Users that run bots will loose followers and friends. This will be their penalty.
And if you are tired of it, then unfriend / unfollow the offender.
The company says
this solves the problem
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Inappropriate?Amir: nice of somebody to finally start answering some posts here, but how arrogant are you to mark this issue as solved before waiting for further feedback from your users? your answer DOES NOT solve the problem. allowing users to gain karma by cheating while honest users lose karma because of your stupid algorithm IS the problem. unfriend/unfollow the offender DOES NOT make the problem go away, a point that's already been made over and over again.6 Comments Add a comment
This solves the problem
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I am answering posts and I have done this for a long time, but with a response like that don't expect me to ever answer one of your posts again.
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Amir: it comes as no surprise to me that you would try to manufacture an excuse to ignore this issue... and people can go back through the previous posts and decide for themselves the very small percentage of posts that you reply to.
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Greg, read the replies yourself. Nobody else is calling for @martinbogo's karma to be stripped. Either we like to read his plurks, or we don't. (I don't.)
My peeve is People who care about karma enough to plurk things like, "good morning!" "karma maintenance :)" and "good night!" Those are the plurks that aren't interesting and are pure noise. I don't care if a bot plurks them or a human. That kind of plurk is noise to me either way.
It's not the bot. It's the content of the message that matters.
So, what do I do about all those plurkers who who write karma maintaining plurks like, "good morning plurktopia!" There's THOUSANDS of them! I don't friend them. They're out of my life, and I'm happy for it. I could care less what their karma is. -
David: The bots are a big problem so long as the karma algorithm punishes users for inactivity. Without that penalty the bots would still give their users an unfair karma increase that isn't deserved, but the advantage wouldn't be magnified so much.
As far as the 'noise' plurks are concerned, the majority of them can be attributed to the karma algorithm. If plurks were given less value and if replies were given more, then I think you'd see a much less populated timeline and a lot less nonsense. It's one of the points I made long ago in this article: http://plurkingpoppa.wordpress.com/#k... -
Greg: Without the karma penalty, I doubt the bots would exist at all.
This is a fascinating social experiment. -
As a social experiment it is indeed fascinating, in many different respects.LOL.
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Inappropriate?I personally love @williamshakespeare, and I don't think it's ALWAYS necessarily cheating -- at least in Shakespeare's case, he only bots, so it's more of a botting account. In my opinion WHO CARES if some people bot? Like Amir said, it doesn't hurt anyone or the system, and if everyone unfriends them they would lose the whole point of Plurk: to make friends. Karma is not why people Plurk. If some people bot for play, such as Shakespeare, that's great. The only people that should be looked down upon would be the users that bot nonsense for Karma to the point of spam, but once again, Karma is not why people Plurk. If someone wants to enjoy Plurk, they gotta do more than automatically post. I feel that the problem with resolve itself.
I’m for Bots in some cases
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This solves the problem
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I am a man More sinn'd against than sinning.
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Natsukisensei: LOTS CARE. You don't, and that's fine. But it doesn't mean that others don't exist.
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Inappropriate?Some bots do get a little out of hand... These are all of the responses I saw in a recent plurk strictly to attempt to maintain the person's Karma:
*bot* [was] just about to say the same thing!
*bot* [wonders] if this is true?
*real user* [says] there was a lot of this when the convention was here. I know they met with some vets
*bot* [thinks] you're right.
*bot* [was] just about to say the same thing!
*bot* [feels] the burn!
*bot* [wonders] if this is true?
*bot* [thinks] you're right.
*bot* [asks] if you're sure about that?
I consider that more noise than good mornings or good nights. I actually enjoy good mornings and good nights because it lets me know when they are on and off plurk for awhile.
I don't favor bots for karma maintenance, however, I can't say I consider it enough of a problem that Plurk should do something about. I believe in the end the user community will influence the use or non-use of bots by friending or unfriending those who use bot services, as Amir stated.
I’m unconcerned
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True. That bot should be unfriended, or the bot should be changed to be less noisy. The plurker runs the risk of being unfriended by humans if her plurks only get activity created by bots. She should keep that in mind.
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Unfriending the karma bots will solve nothing. They fulfill their purpose when they plurk and get karma for it (and the bot owner avoids a karma penalty for inactivity). Whether anybody reads their nonsense or replies to it is of no consequence.
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Inappropriate?How is this different from users who post "This is an obligatory karma maintenance post" and the like? Besides that @martinbogo, et al., have found a way to automate the process, that is?
It's the same artificial boost to karma, regardless of whether it's a bot or a person behind the message. Why penalize the one if you're not going to penalize the other?
I’m amused at the hypocrisy.
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The people who identify the fact that a plurk is only to maintain karma are honest. That's the big difference. And in my case it's called political action, or activism... a means of alerting other members of the community about a problem that needs solving. BTW... political actions aren't hypocrisy... they're the backbone of democracy.
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Honest? That's lame. I'd rather read automated plurks that were interesting. Like @williamshakespeare, if he were a bot. Far, far more interesting than, "this is a maintenance plurk." I would not favor the latter.
I know a Plurker who plurks from mobile device in bed to maintain karma. I know another who plurks deferred (but original) plurks by cron job (bot). You know one that employs some sort of bot to plurk content that was uninteresting "plurk #512" "plurk #513" and then excepts from Familiar Quotations.
To me, it's fascinating. To you, one (or two) (or all three) of them should be punished. -
Inappropriate?If a bot were able to affect other's karma adversely, or the ability of plurk to manage the load/activity, then you would truly have the "sky is falling" moral dilemma that Greg champions. But as it is, they don't seem to, they only affect their own account. In a world of computers, why can't a computer plurk, even if it is boring? I say there is no problem here.
If plurk really set out to eliminate bots (karma or otherwise) we'd all have to fill out CAPTCHAs before each plurk/response... talk about a user experience killer!2 Comments Add a comment
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According to the developers, karma is supposed to be a measure of a user's activity. When somebody plurks using a bot, it isn't the user who's being active, it's the bot. It's dishonest. And saying that there's a dishonest practise taking place is a lot different than saying that the sky is falling. IOW, clickykbd is being dishonest as well. Is it a question of morals? ethics? integrity? I think it is.
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Continuing to hound the staff about the topic even when they have a) clearly stated their current position, and b) express the system is continuously being developed/tweaked is where my "sky is falling" reference stems. You obviously feel it is a moral dilemma (as you state in the last line). I don't think I was being dishonest in saying so. Unfortunately morals, just like penalizing bots without resorting to complex human detection, is something that can't be programmed into a web site. Your morals are your own prerogative, as are your opinions, entitled, as are mine.
In my opinion the only way to approach a bot/karma problem is with user behavior analysis and filtering.... Which is exactly what the karma system IS! Just give them the time and they'll get it into a more satisfactory state.
The final word on dishonest practices is always going to be the staff. If they don't see the genereal concept of bot plurkers as a problem then QED the bot is not a dishonest practice. It's impossible to both follow a rule while simultaneously breaking it. As for false advertising claims... all they need to do is change the wording from "user" to "member" and end of story. A bot can be a member too ya know. -
Inappropriate?"all they need to do is change the wording from "user" to "member" and end of story. A bot can be a member too ya know."
Why not a user, too, for that matter?1 Comment Add a comment
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Or just go for total ambiguity and call all user/members plurkers (as we already do). ;-)
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