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.
I was a karma-whore, now that Reddit is dead, I’m just a slut.
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.
It also encouraged dumb posts. I could post a long informative comment answering a question directly and get a couple upvotes.
Then if I posted something stupid like “never insult the mac and cheese” it got over 5,000 upvotes and awards.
I’ll go and look at how my recent comments and submissions are doing, but that’s more to get a sense of how my outlook aligns with the outlook of the general readership. And when the alignment is off, I’ll look at other comments to see what is getting traction.
By this process, its become clear to me that the outlook of Reddit The Userbase (as opposed to Reddit The Company) has become much younger in recent years. All too often, when my positions are heavily downvoted, neighboring comments expressing more popular (populist?) positions make me think, “Yeah, I used to think that … thirty plus years ago.”
I didnt like to check the karma on my comments bc what if i got downvoted or worse… what if someone replied to me and id have to engage in conversation?! :0
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.
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.
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.
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.