I was a karma-whore, now that Reddit is dead, I'm just a slut.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Here, have some internet points you slut
ohh yeaaaah.... mhhhmmm... grlgrlgrlgrlgrl
here's an extra up doot
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.
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?
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.
A few times I had people make a negative comment about my comment karma showing I was online too much.
Which was true but it did make me selfconscious and switch to an alt half the time.
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.
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.
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.
It should be used only to determine in which order posts and comments are displayed.
Only to some...
Posted with Artemis (beta)
Unrelated but where do you download the Artemis app?
It’s in private beta rn. Tho in the magazine there’s a sign up sheet.
I agree, I have no idea how much karma I had on my account and I never looked or paid attention.
I’ve never been sure if all the chatter about it is people actually caring, or if it was always mostly a joke.
It was important enough for karma-farming bots to exist for some reason, I dunno. I'm glad it's not really a thing here, it was especially frustrating to see the occasional innocuous comment be downvoted for some inexplicable reason.
It's to get around thresholds.
The bot accounts were mostly about to be sold on third party websites or used for scams.
Ah, yeah, forgot about that. So yeah, karma matters to some people very much.
when I used imgur, before I was active on Reddit, I loved getting upvotes. but on Reddit, it seemed like a bit more of a slog and it wasn't immediately visible, so pretty unimportant to me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But! You could exchange it for stuff at the reddit store!! /s
I found it really hard to believe people would care that much about karma to the point that I never really believed most accusations of “karmawhore.” Because who would care that much? You just don’t like this kind of content that got popular. I totally believed a few individuals would optimize their posts and comments for the most upvotes, but not nearly enough to justify how often I heard that accusation flung around. Sure, it feels nice to see that other people like your comment. And it’s nice to have the voting system so incorrect information, spam, and trolls get downvoted and thus hidden; while theoretically the helpful and insightful comments rise to the top (and at least in the subs I used, this is how it also worked in practice, although judging by all the complaining about Reddit I see here it wasn’t true for a lot of other peoples’s subs). And of course you will want to get your karma past the common thresholds for not getting your post removed for being a new, low-karma account. But otherwise, what does it really matter?
There were a lot of attention-seeking people on reddit who weren't necessarily trying to get karma. It just happened that karma was the measure of the attention you were getting, so being a "karmawhore" was a side effect of wanting attention.
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