The problem with karma is in the big picture. A lot of actions that yield lots of karma are not contributive to the community at large:

• unnecessary reposts and cross-posts; not based on the overall contribution that it brings to the comm, but on its potential to harness votes. This makes the content of the comms less diverse and interesting for veteran users.
• moderators deleting content from other users just so they can repost it later on, to farm karma. This happens quite a bit in a certain site, disengages the users, and creates unnecessary drama.
• people stop contributing with certain discourses not because they think “this is not contributive”, but because it’s unpopular. Sometimes you need to voice a hot take on an issue, to further discussion.
• it enables mods implementing stupid/arbitrary barriers like “you need X karma to post here”, instead of pressing the instance admins to get rid of trolls and bots.

I also believe that karma is one of the big components of the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it. It leads to shallow content.

And we might say “I wouldn’t do those things for karma!”, and a lot of people wouldn’t indeed, but the ones who’d do it would make the place less interesting for everyone.

I always ignored the numbers. I go where the chatter is. Which is why I love that I can sort by new comments, making it work like an old forum where a comment to a post pushes it to the top, so active discussion stays on the front page.

The numbers serve no real purpose other than complicating the above method of sorting by trying to add a perception of “liked” or “hated” to things that doesn’t need to be there.

Instead of anonymously making numbers go up, I need actual interaction for my brain juice.

I think it keeps the people from saying what they want or how they want to say it. I saw an AskReddit post once that asked why do people on reddit sound like the same person. Well it was because in time, in order to keep or gain karma, everyone would eventually sound like the generic user.

I don’t like karma. It incentivizes short, meme-y posts since those are things that get gets a lot of karma.