It’s just good that there is no karma on user profiles. There will be no hierarchy between users based on karma and no circlejerking around it. Like “hehehe see how you have so small amount of karma” and something else. Karma scores on posts should only matter.
There’s a comment further below that’s actually pretty scary when people believe/live this sort of thing:
On Reddit Karma is typically used to show legitimacy and maturity. If you have 20k Karma from having 20k more upvotes than downvotes, your comment is probably worth giving a read.
That’s great - isn’t that exactly the ‘social score’ implemented in China? Yikes.
Sure, it’s a bit like the Chinese social score. But it’s a private company site, not a government score. Huge difference.
The construct on Reddit is obviously contained within Reddit, but it’s plenty harmful within that environment, when and if people decide whether or not they’ll interact with someone else based on their ‘score’.
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You mean on user profiles? We used to have them shown but voted to turn them off, to prevent karma farming.
But we also do show real scores, including the downvotes, for comments and posts.
What’s the use of karma?
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