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.
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.
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.”
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 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
There was a discussion on karma some days ago, if anyone want a read. https://lemmy.world/post/590386
TL;DR consensus is mostly karma is the source of quite a number of problems on Reddit and many people are comfortable with not having them back. There are positives, but the system has to be reworked for it to really work to any capacity that doesn’t negatively affect the platform.
Personally, I don’t look at karma. I barely even checked other people’s user page and I only went on my own page to look for my previous comments.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think everybody checked the own posts for the karma they got for it. So I think it plays a huge role. Of course some people go too far and make it the only thing that matters about it. I won’t miss those people.