Honestly, nobody even looks at other people’s Karma. I didn’t care much about it. Did people really care so much baout Karma that they mourn about it here, or miss it, or used to farm it?
Sorry if the tone sounds judgemental, but I’m just wondering.
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.
Yes, it was great protection against spam accounts, b/c on day 1 they would start with nothing, and have to actively earn karma before they could switch to selling t-shirts or promote OF sites or whatever. Every little bit helps in the efforts to combat simply spinning up a thousand of those and be able to instantly spam whatever sub(s) you wanted.
Karma (especially comment karma) is useful to indicate someone makes positive contributions, but once you’re above a few hundred it doesn’t really make a difference. I do wonder if it makes Reddit worse though, because it incentivises low effort comments and content to get easy karma.
