document updated 12 years ago, on Jul 25, 2011
Some folks on reddit try to get as negative comment karma as possible.
Most trolls try to outrage people into posting heated replies. These folks are different though, they just want your downvote.
Why do they do this?
This is just speculation. I can't speak for someone else.
A way to understand the human psyche
Like other trolling, it could be trial-and-error method for learning how to push other people's buttons. Some trolls believe that it's useful to learn how to push people's buttons, because this is way to get better at figuring out what's going in inside other people's heads generally. It's a pretty antisocial way to learn this, but it's one possible way.
A reaction to "don't feed the trolls"
The usual way to deal with trolls is to ignore them. Downvote them so they don't get more attention, but otherwise ignore them.
But a downvote troll wants to be downvoted. What's the proper response to that?? You still feel compelled to downvote them. The troll knows this, and they enjoy the fact that others are forced to comply with their wishes.
Split personality
Another possibility is that it's the "bad" half of a pair of accounts, where the author tries to maintain their positive karma on one account, by posting comments that they know will go against the hivemind in an alt account. What's interesting is that because the author is posting their more positive comments on another account, they end up inadvertently making the alt account seem more hostile and trollish than the author really is.
I've definitely seen examples of this, when the author knows that they have a different view from the rest of Reddit (eg. very religious, very conservative, etc). Usually these folks would stop posting on Reddit, but a few don't want to be silenced.
One way to tell if this is happening is if their posts come from a consistent viewpoint. Trolls will constantly shift their backstory, merely to get a rise out of people. A split personality account will have a consistent viewpoint, even if it's consistently disagreeable. A troll is inauthentic, a split personality is authentic.
Discussion threads
There have been some discussions by non-trolls, about how to deal with this phenomenon:
- 2011-May-30, 18 comments
- 2011-Feb-15, 11 comments
- 2011-Jan-29, 108 comments
- 2011-Jan-15, 4 comments
- 2011-Jan-10, 14 comments
- 2011-Jan-8, 413 comments
- 2010-Nov-7, 11 comments
- 2010-Oct-29, 23 comments
- 2010-Aug-31, 10 comments
- 2010-Mar-4, 127 comments
Example accounts
See /r/negativekarma. Other examples:
Proposed countermeasures
Automatically ban users who have a large negative karma.
This would encoruage groupthink and discourage/ban users who merely have dissenting opinions.
Hide posts that fall below a certain threshold
Automatically limit the rate that users who have a large negative karma can post.
(eg. -500 karma = 1 post per day, -750 karma = 1 post every 2 days, -1000 karma = 1 post per week)
This might work? ...