Do people actually give a shit about Karma on reddit?
- Thread starter DudeistBelieve
- Start date
Dude. I made a post about it to try and better understand why people do care. Not everyone on the internet is trying to be a smug superior douche.DoPo said:
Thats how you learn shit. By asking questions.
If those questions betray a fair bit of negative emotion, then I can only conclude they aren't "for informational purposes". There is a difference between asking "What's the time" and "WHAT IS THE FUCKING TIME" - the neutral questions, I find, are most often...neutral.DudeistBelieve said:
Well thank you for explaining to me why I made my post. I suppose I must've been confused, after all I who am I to suppose, I'm only the person that made said post in the first place, right?DoPo said:
Feel however you want about how I phrased it. You're wrong, brah.
If you want to "just ask a question", I have outlined how to do it. What you did wasn't that. You feel however you want to feel about what you wrote, but if you want to change what other people feel the same, you'd need to tailor your words to match your intention.DudeistBelieve said:
And I can't believe I'm about to say this, but can everybody just stay on topic? Even though I believe the question has been answered already. I personally don't really see the point of either continually engaging me in offtopic discussions.
I honestly hate karma/vote systems on forums since they're basically immature bullying/censorship tools.
And i'm coming from having multiple 10,000+ karma accounts so its not a sob story here.
Some people really care about it even though it means nothing past the first 10 or so that lets you post without delays. But it acts as an effective censorship tool on those who do care since a few downvotes can often mean comment deletion.
And i'm coming from having multiple 10,000+ karma accounts so its not a sob story here.
Some people really care about it even though it means nothing past the first 10 or so that lets you post without delays. But it acts as an effective censorship tool on those who do care since a few downvotes can often mean comment deletion.
I'm pretty sure enough downvotes in a sub can restrict how often you can post.DudeistBelieve said:
I dunno. Why do people care about likes on Youtube or Facebook? Why do we here at The Escapist care about our post count, join date or those tiny badges we're so proud of?[footnote]Don't try to deny it, every one of you loves those stupid little things...including me.[/footnote]
If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say it's a combination of our desire to be socially validated and our hunter-gatherer instinct to collect and hoard stuff, even if it's something as abstract as numbers. When we see those likes/karma go up it strokes both of these urges at the same time, and when it goes down it grates against it.
If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say it's a combination of our desire to be socially validated and our hunter-gatherer instinct to collect and hoard stuff, even if it's something as abstract as numbers. When we see those likes/karma go up it strokes both of these urges at the same time, and when it goes down it grates against it.
I care about it in the sense that my post is more likely to be read if it has higher karma.
However, I loath karma in general. It creates such a hivemind mentality on many different forums. Take the Guild Wars 2 subreddit for instance (just an example, there are tons of subs that are like this). Up until a recent patch, people were constantly complaining about the game. The patch hits, it adds no new content, but it fixes some grinding issues and has a lot of pages. Suddenly, everyone is happy. Posting an opinion about the lack of new content will now net you negative karma when in the previous week, you'd have everyone agreeing with you.
If you treat a subreddit like it's one individual who has multiple personalities, you can pretty easily "farm" karma if you want. Just post things you know that the organism will like. Because of this, I find karma as a whole, quite meaningless.
However, I loath karma in general. It creates such a hivemind mentality on many different forums. Take the Guild Wars 2 subreddit for instance (just an example, there are tons of subs that are like this). Up until a recent patch, people were constantly complaining about the game. The patch hits, it adds no new content, but it fixes some grinding issues and has a lot of pages. Suddenly, everyone is happy. Posting an opinion about the lack of new content will now net you negative karma when in the previous week, you'd have everyone agreeing with you.
If you treat a subreddit like it's one individual who has multiple personalities, you can pretty easily "farm" karma if you want. Just post things you know that the organism will like. Because of this, I find karma as a whole, quite meaningless.
There are two things I dislike about Reddit karma:
One is that it turns the sorting into a populist fuckpit full of the lowest common denominators for any particular group. (i.e. exactly what it was designed for, drive traffic.)
The other is that people downvote rather than argue with you.
These effectively make the site everything I'm not interested in. Oh huray, a bunch of people who either agree with you (pretty much zero conversation value) or downvote you (also pretty much zero conversation value.)
But then again, you have to take the site on its own terms, I suppose. It's good for harvesting funny gifs from time to time, it's good for harvesting content. That's pretty much what it is - a content sorting site, it's not primarily there for discussion and it doesn't do well in that arena.
-shrugs-
I have solved this incredibly complicated problem by just not posting on Reddit.
One is that it turns the sorting into a populist fuckpit full of the lowest common denominators for any particular group. (i.e. exactly what it was designed for, drive traffic.)
The other is that people downvote rather than argue with you.
These effectively make the site everything I'm not interested in. Oh huray, a bunch of people who either agree with you (pretty much zero conversation value) or downvote you (also pretty much zero conversation value.)
But then again, you have to take the site on its own terms, I suppose. It's good for harvesting funny gifs from time to time, it's good for harvesting content. That's pretty much what it is - a content sorting site, it's not primarily there for discussion and it doesn't do well in that arena.
-shrugs-
I have solved this incredibly complicated problem by just not posting on Reddit.
*shrug* people are going to give a shit about anything, somewhere. Reputation, perception, so-on-so-forth all the usual stuff. And of course, E-peen. That's always a play when you can +/- someone's opinion, someone else is going to use it as a Yard Stick for the measuring contest.
Personally, I've found Reddit Karma is kinda... unreliable. It's often better to just get a gauge of the sub-forum rather than relying on what is being upvoted/downvoted. Two sub-forums about the same topic can treat the same post differently, since each and every one has it's own kind of 'personality' due to the different communities they entail. Get better results reading the content of the posts - both upvoted and downvoted - rather than going 'Yep, this ************ got a -22, gonna just ignore his ass'.
Personally, I've found Reddit Karma is kinda... unreliable. It's often better to just get a gauge of the sub-forum rather than relying on what is being upvoted/downvoted. Two sub-forums about the same topic can treat the same post differently, since each and every one has it's own kind of 'personality' due to the different communities they entail. Get better results reading the content of the posts - both upvoted and downvoted - rather than going 'Yep, this ************ got a -22, gonna just ignore his ass'.
I don't post on reddit. Nor really visit beyond funny cat pictures.
However, the more "Serious" side of reddit has always seem pretty circle jerky and it kinda seems like Karma is actually something people do care about over there.
Which... Eh. Given from the outside, it basically seems like you have a bunch of tribalism going on where a community downvotes everyone from another community they dislike, whilst upvoting their own.
I'll stick to my cute cat pictures.
However, the more "Serious" side of reddit has always seem pretty circle jerky and it kinda seems like Karma is actually something people do care about over there.
Which... Eh. Given from the outside, it basically seems like you have a bunch of tribalism going on where a community downvotes everyone from another community they dislike, whilst upvoting their own.
I'll stick to my cute cat pictures.
That article is pretty glorious, and the issue sadly common.Zhukov said:
As for the topic, I dunno. Do people give a shit about Reddit period? It's a place to post cool things and get downvoted by people for literally no discernible reason.