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Comment by ASalazarMX | Hacker News Reader

> But it did make me think about just how easy it is to farm karma on Reddit, and how useless it is as a proxy for "trust" or "reputation" or anything other than what it is - fake internet points.

More than fake internet points, it's a distilled popularity contest, and we know popular people isn't necessarily trustworthy. Reddit calling it karma gives it more credit than it deserves.

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Reddit calling it karma is a throwback to its early days when "upvote posts that meaningfully contribute real value to the discussion, even if you disagree with the content" was a closely held ideal of the reddit community. Sort of closer to how Stack Overflow upvotes are currently intended.

> even if you disagree with the content

yeah, the intention was good, but that's not how it works, unfortunately.

I get unreasonably annoyed at seeing posts get downvoted just because they don’t fit the mainstream opinion, especially if the author clearly put in a lot of effort to articulate their views. Bonus points if there are zero replies too.

Anyone who downvotes like that is just lazy, close minded and cowardly. It’s sad that it happens so often.

> Bonus points if there are zero replies too.

This frustrates me to no end. If someone can type out a long comment explaining their position, the least you can do is reply with why you disagree, in addition/instead of hitting the downvote.

Yeah, I tend to upvote in this situation, even when I disagree.

> Reddit calling it karma gives it more credit than it deserves.

I remember PhpBB and vBulletin forums having karma plug-ins back in 2005, this isn't something invented by reddit at all

Slashdot had something similar many years earlier

I think they even called it Karma--back in the late 90's. I bet that's where the term originated.

Gee, Slashdot. That brings back memories

Slasdot had karma, Kuro5hin had mojo.

I wonder how many people are popular among the automated audience.

Whuffie.

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