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 burned accounts frequently so karma didn’t matter, except in terms of meeting posting thresholds. Upvotes/downvotes mattered to me because they were “feedback” for what I said. Other poster’s karma mainly mattered to me when trying to sus out if someone was an alt/bot/troll account.
karma only mattered if you wanted to be a reddit “influencer” i.e. reddit gives you free rewards hoping you will tout them and get others to buy them when they see yours.
source: had a moderate karma count, they gave me a free avatar thing. my lesser accounts didn’t receive shit.
I tended to reroll every year anyway. the algos get stale after a while.
When I was a mod, karma points could come in handy when trying to decide if a user 1) just had a one-off weird day and just needed one comment removed, 2) had a slightly questionable comment history and needed to have all comments manually approved or 3) had a history of hate speech and needed to be banned immediately across the associated communities.
I also appreciated in informational subs that karma would allow for the most accurate or additional information to rise to the top. It wasn’t 100% accurate and could really depend upon the sub, particularly the moderation team, but it allowed the drivel or disinformation to be more easily ignored.
Sure, there’s a bit of gamification with made up points, but karma does have it’s uses and I’m hoping that the positive aspects can be brought over to the fediverse.
Okay, it appears that I’m going to be the only dissenting opinion here.
The discussion around karma here is all centered on the SFW side of reddit, it appears. I used to operate on the NSFW side of reddit to find sexual partners. After I would make a post explaining the kind of connection I wanted to make, I would get like 150 offers over the course of 3 days, both over direct messages (orangered inbox) and chat requests (chattit).
I would only respond to users who had any sort of karma, post history, or more than just a few months on their account. My thought process was that I don’t want to meet people who are 100% lurkers, I would favor people who had comment histories on normal subs and were contributing members in those communities (gave me hope they would be interesting conversationalists on the date), and I wanted to see some longevity in the account so that there was a clear sense of the decorum of old reddit versus all the sally-come-lately users.
ETA: I suspect that I was getting so many offers because I myself had made several submissions (lending to my own non-zero karma score) both text and photo and I had a long-standing account. I think I would have been viewed skeptically by everyone if my account was 3 days old and I had zero content, but was trawling for sex. That’s how men show up with 2 kidneys but leave with 1 in the morning.