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> Who has ever looked at a reddit profile and decided that an account should be trusted based on karma?

For starters, automated subreddit spam protection algorithms. You may have misinterpreted me, think of it like StackOverflow karma. Your account needs a certain amount before it can do certain things.

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Yes, maybe like +200 (which is what I've set it at as a mod in severe cases of brigading), not thousands. Most of the subreddits don't require anything but positive karma, and you can achieve that with less than a dozen manually created bots upvoting the comments that new bots make.

There are no subreddits with a spam algorithm counted in the thousands of karma, that would prevent them from growing.

> with less than a dozen manually created bots upvoting the comments that new bots make.

As I said in my other comment, these self-upvoting schemes are very easy to detect and are not a scalable way to create tens of thousands of bots.

In the black market of reddit accounts, age and karma are the two main selling points.

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