Could someone explain how the reddit karma system works?
Things like how and why you get it. Differences in the two types etc.
Posted Mar 25, 2015, 10:55 PM UTC
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Its nothing except an ego booster. It has next to no use or purpose. Except having a low or negative karma rating in specific subreddits limits how often you can post there.
Comment karma is for comments, links for links (not self posts).
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ok, so when someone upvotes a comment I make, I get comment karma?
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Yes. And if they downvote, you lose karma.
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Does it just lead to group think and people being afraid to say something that might offend someone? Does this all just trend towards people saying what they think others want to hear?
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It can if its not controlled. Many comments are simply what people think will be upvoted instead of what they might truly want to post.
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There are two kinds of karma: Link and Comment. You get link karma from posting links, comment karma from posting comments obviously.
When you post, you have the option of a Link post or a Self post. Self posts are text only, and while people can upvote or downvote it, you don't get any karma for them. The only purpose in voting on self posts is to make them more or less visible when someone is viewing that subreddit sorted by top posts.
You do get link karma for link posts, and you do get comment karma for comments posted in a thread. So for example, I could post a self post, earn no karma for that, but then reply to comments in the thread and earn comment karma for those.
One last thing to know about is called "vote fuzzing." You may sometimes look at your posts, and notice that the karma score on them goes up or down by a few points every time you look at them; this is because reddit automatically camouflages the score. They do that to fool people using vote bots to game the system. The actual score is always kept track of, and you always get the actual score on your karma totals, but it might not look like it from the individual posts.
Do controversial comments generate more of the "fuzzing"? How come my low-scoring comments (only 1 or 2 up-votes) don't ever seem to move?
Does my comment karma display my total number of positive minus the negative? ...If I totaled all the up-votes (minus what it auto-generates myself) and the karma shows a significant difference (20+ lower then I counted)? Or are the extra numbers because that's part of the fuzz?
I'm honestly not sure. I don't think links can be lower than 0 as far as your score goes, though they can be as far as visibility goes. I could be wrong about that though. And I believe the higher the karma, the more fuzzing it gets.
Interesting. Thanks for that! :-)
Is there a deeper meaning if one's link karma stays the same over a long period of time? Like a shadowban is there anything for karma points?
Nope, not as far as I know. Link karma is weird, lots of brilliant stuff goes ignored, and sometimes some dumb thing catches on for no reason and is worth thousands. Btw, you can check if you were shadowbanned by opening reddit without logging in and searching for yourself. If you can find your own profile, you're not shadowbanned.
Thanks for the explanation and the tip too :)
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Thnakxfor describing