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.
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.
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.
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.
So true…my well thought out comments mostly flew under the radar. Stupid ones, or low effort ones received the most upvotes.
It’s such an odd measure, and people in different subreddits were all over the place with their upvotes. I often couldn’t make sense out of it.
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.”
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.
But there was/is a game of complex karma farming.
When I first got into Reddit I was having political debates with users but I couldn’t get into some subs without a bit of karma. In several occasions I had to rely on a new throwaway account to post / comment /reply to a conversation I was having. It’s not easy by design to restart a new account and jump into a sub you want to get into right away. I quickly discovered that there was a method to quickly generating karma with a new account. Repost, repeat and comment on r/funny, r/pics (and whatever top subs with easy access) at certain hours of the day to catch the early morning Asian crowd, the evening north american crowd and the late night Europeans and within a few hours you’ll end up with an account with a few thousand karma.
I’m sure more sophisticated karma farmers have a far more complex algorithm that can get a new account up to many thousands of karma in a day or two.
Which leads to the realisation that karma is worthless now.
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
What would you do if you had to engage in conversation?