Funny, I noticed latvianbloke downvoting an article on the Philly shooting where kids got hurt.

How many damn emails does this person have? Lmfao

And this is what I'm talking about lol, see any familiar names?

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'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.

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).

Definitely. The public nature of voting means that it should be possible for anyone to write a bot that spots these patterns automatically.

Whether instance admins do anything about it is a separate matter, but at least everyone will know whether they're doing something about it.