Reddit Migration

I was a karma-whore, now that Reddit is dead, I'm just a slut.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

@writeblankspace

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.

Only to some...

Posted with Artemis (beta)

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 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.

But! You could exchange it for stuff at the reddit store!! /s

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.

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?