this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
38 points (100.0% liked)
Reddit Migration
145 readers
1 users here now
### About Community Tracking and helping #redditmigration to Kbin and the Fediverse. Say hello to the decentralized and open future. To see latest reeddit blackout info, see here: https://reddark.untone.uk/
founded 1 year ago
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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."
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.
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?