I was perusing through the "hiddens" this morning (usually lots of fun) and checked out the status of a couple of users to see if they were still officially around by the time I read their comments. While looking at the users' member page, I noticed that following them was one of the regular troll hunters we have here at DKos. My first thought was "Holy shit those hunters are fast!!", so let me begin by saying I appreciate their efforts in informing the community that they may not want to rec a troll/zombie/sockpuppet, as well as general shoo-ing. However, I think one hunting tactic is actually counter-productive and may be affecting the auto-ban's effectiveness, causing Markos to have to do more manual work than I'm sure he would prefer for Obvious Troll™.
Note from Kos's diary about mojo on DK4 here.
CITIZENRY --
This is mojo for being a good community member. You get points for:
Following people
A boost for following "obscure" or new people
Having people follow you
Having a subscription (tiny boost, but a boost nonetheless)
Length of account
There are 2-3 users who are 90% of the hunter population, and this is by no means a call-out diary to them, but a general call for reconsideration by the community about the "following" tactic for obvious or suspected trolls/zombies/sockpuppets. Occasionally, there is an obvious zombie who will be followed by 7-8 users who recognize the troll and want to be able to HR it every time it shows up, but by doing so they are actually ADDING to the zombie's mojo until getting to it in order to HR.
If you read the link, you can see you gain mojo by following new users as well...but let's not let our desire for our own mojo + our initiative against likely disruptors actually lead us to start from behind in our efforts to contain them!
Keep a sticky-note pad next to your normal Kos'ing computer instead =)
*Caveat that I, nor do the vast majority (if any) of regular users (not employees) of Daily Kos, know the proprietary mojo calculation algorithim. It may be that gaining followers is marginal relative to receiving HR's, but most of the time the hunters following aren't HR'ing on sight until there's notable bad behavior. ymmv.