Did Karma really matter that much in Reddit?

adonis , 1 year ago

I was a karma-whore, now that Reddit is dead, I'm just a slut.

Motecuhzoma , 1 year ago

Here, have some internet points you slut

adonis , 1 year ago

ohh yeaaaah.... mhhhmmm... grlgrlgrlgrlgrl

hariette , 1 year ago

Only to some...

Posted with Artemis (beta)

writeblankspace OP , 11 months ago

Unrelated but where do you download the Artemis app?

hariette , 11 months ago

It’s in private beta rn. Tho in the magazine there’s a sign up sheet.

root_beer , 1 year ago

It was important enough for karma-farming bots to exist for some reason, I dunno. I'm glad it's not really a thing here, it was especially frustrating to see the occasional innocuous comment be downvoted for some inexplicable reason.

livus , 1 year ago

It's to get around thresholds.

The bot accounts were mostly about to be sold on third party websites or used for scams.

snooggums , 1 year ago

Karma was pointless. Just checked and apparently I ended up with 340k+ comment karma which was mostly repeating memes and reddit inside jokes and a few rants about Republicans. Posts that I thought had value tended to be downvoted (opinions of running role playing games).

The number doesn't mean anything and nothing of value was lost when I edited or deleted all of my reddit posts as most everything I posted also exists from other posts I have made on forums over the decades.

So in a roundabout way, karma was pointless and I hope it doesn't end up being a thing here.

Spiritreader , 11 months ago

I get what you're saying, but I wouldn't say it was pointless as a whole. Maybe it's because I'm looking at it from a slightly different perspective.

Karma did help push engagement, in fact, the system worked.
People cared about this number, and started to optimize their behavior such that they receive the largest amount of karma in the shortest time.
Since being active by posting / commenting facilitated getting karma, it helped produce a lot of content and made people interact with each other.

The problem with that is that it wasn't tied to quality (and couldn't be). As you said, that encouraged regurgitating the same meta over and over. It never incentivized good content, just quantity.

So my conclusion would be more like: Karma was pointless for animating users to create good and thoughtful content.
Instead it helped driving engagement forward, but at the cost of somewhat turning people into bots.

Posts receiving upvotes / downvotes is okay, but I'm not sure in what way reputation - or karma - should be displayed for a user account, publicly or privately.

Awwab , 1 year ago

I used the top karma holders lists to remove their posts from my feed since it was usually people posting the same thing in multiple subs. I would often have only a few posts before the marker for page 2 would show up.

Mostly_Harmless , 1 year ago

Some subreddits require a certain level of karma to be able to post or reply to comments. I don't know if that was to help against bots or people who would make an account to avoid a ban or something. Other than that karma was just an ego boost for those who cared about such things.

Prezhotnuts , 1 year ago

Karma is all about gamification. Made up points to make you feel like your contribution was worth something. You can see it in pretty much all social media platforms.

You never really care about checking others, but I bet you'd probably take a peak from time to time at your own.

I never cared, but I would be lieing if when I post blew up I wouldn't notice all those upvotes.

writeblankspace OP , 1 year ago

True. For those who don’t really look at Karma, the upvotes still mattered. It feels nice when your post blows up and people liked your contribution.

Coelacanth , 1 year ago

While I agree with everything you said, it did also serve a tangible purpose on some subreddits as a barrier-of-entry to prevent bots from posting OF spam or whatever or stop new troll accounts from being able to post.