this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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I never understood that.. Why did people want karma points? Was it anything more than having 'liked' posts? There's no real value. It's like when my BIL used to give all the kids brownie points for getting salsa or reading a book.
Personal insecurity. The same reason why Instagram exists.
If you gamify something people with addiction and addiction-adjacent problems will inevitably interact with it in the gamified way. This was the first state of the karma system harming the site.
Then in the second stage once karma started getting more "serious" (preventing users from posting/commenting and being used as an "authenticity" check- what led to farmed and sold accounts) which led to a further breakdown of the karma system.
The underlying issue is despite being an absolutely useless measure in reality- the site itself ascribed value to them and caused people with (what we'd probably refer to as bad) economic incentives to act on that behavior then rationally acted.