One of the things platforms use to keep us coming back and investing more of our time in building their site for them, is Internet Points. They don’t do anything, but we still crave them.
On Reddit, these Internet Points are, of course, called “karma”
In moving on from Reddit, I’m burning over 80k karma.
It feels fine. I mean, it has no real value, and bots can scrounge up that amount of karma in an afternoon, but it still represents a sizable time investment.
How much are you burning, and how do you feel about it?
I feel manipulated by the karma. It has no value and yet I care when i get downvoted. It’s a huge warning sign to get off reddit and into a healthier community.
I had like 20000 karma on some previous reddit account i deleted a few years back. Current one has 3000 karma or so. Because I post a lot, and I wrote things people agree with usually. But it’s a echo chamber, and once I start to limit myself to writing things that are “safe” from a karma point of view, I’m literally just supporting the entire karma system.
It’s something very Chinese about these points. They have this social system where citizens have a score, and if they get too low, they can’t get loans and whatnot. Pretty much what the show black mirror was showing, and China now has it.
Are you questioning The Party, comorade?
That’s not China, that’s the USA. It’s called Credit Score, in America you go to jail if it gets too low.
35k karma, 11.5yrs.
I agree, though I don’t think we should limit this discussion to ‘1984-with-Chinese-characteristics’, lest we ignore the similar ways that western countries are sliding into authoritarianism. We have a vast body of literature warning us about these dystopic futures awaiting us, so it’ll be only us to blame if we don’t heed their warnings.
I was part of a very contentious sub where the community was pretty toxic and you had two groups always clashing. It went in waves…for a few months one side would be “stronger” and get more karma and then it would switch to the other. I got addicted to the drama and shit stirring but now I’m realizing that it didn’t do a lot of good for my mental health. I was spending way too much time there and thinking of the ideal retort or how to show people on the other side that their arguments were stupid and so they were. Ultimately for what? I’m sure a lot of the people there were shitposting from several accounts at the same time. The mods were pretty useless or subtly encouraged the drama. It was all a big waste of time.