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Comment by grawprog | 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.

I have to say, do people really take karma, upvotes, credit, fake internet points etc. As a measure of trustworthiness? I know reddit pushes this idea but do people actually participating in communities with point systems see those with high karma points or whatever as trustworthy?

Personally, i've always assumed people with high amounts of karma or stars are just people who've spent a significant amount of their lives on a site and participated a lot.

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"Trust" in this context means that you can be more certain that there is a real person with a certain level of time investment and legitimate intent behind the account. Compare that to an new account whose only purpose is to post an ad before getting banned.

Karma thresholds are highly effective spam filters.

Not necessarily. There's a site I use with a star based karma system. A bunch of years ago there was a glitch in the site that led to a bunch of random members getting ridiculous amounts of stars.

People still ask questions about it to this day as to why there's random members with this.

> Karma thresholds are highly effective spam filters.

And that's the reason why a lot of sites sell high karma accounts, whether those were hijacked, or karma farmed farmed for that purpose. People can make quite a few bucks if they find an effective way to farm it.

You'd be surprised. Even if you're aware of it, you may start noticing a post you like made be a high-karma person. Confirmation bia sets in, and very soon, your subconscious is engaged. This stuff was build that way by design.

I dunno, I usually go out of my way to avoid looking at people's scores on places like that. Even my own if I can help it. HN is hard, it's right in the corner there, but I really don't tend to look at anyone else's scores. Same with reddit or other sites I use with those systems.

Don't get me wrong, I get the little dopamine rush and enjoy getting points and stuff, but I look at the whole thing the same way as a high score board on a video game or something.

I've never looked at anyone's points. It's pointless. Pun intended. It's not a descriptor of anything of value. Essentially I take information on reddit as it is, and use my own critical thinking skills to judge the opinion or value the opinion has to me. Sometimes there is great information, sometimes it's just people trolling. Everything is taken with a grain of salt.

Maybe it's also because you guys know how to write scripts like that. I don't know how to do that so I earn my karma in the way it was intended. If I happen to notice someone's karma on Reddit, usually their history will quickly show you what's up.

Now you made me curious about your opinion of karma on places like stack overflow.

Stack overflow i've got mixed feelings about. I've seen it work well sometimes, with the highest quality answer being voted to the top. Other times, it seems the top answers are not the best or just a bunch of pointless arguing.

I've never participated much in any of the stack overflow communities other than passively. I tried asking a question once that I hadn't seen on there but I got downvoted and told off so meh...I just stick to searching and passively reading mostly. I have thought of updating some older answers but they were usually locked and closed to discussion.

Interesting. Seems like a complex problem to get a community right as it scales.

Thanks for sharing your perspective.

Tangential, but one of my stock interview questions is to ask candidates how they decide whether to use a new dependency in production code.

The vast majority of people say GitHub stars and leave it at that. Occasionally they also mention checking how active the project is. Very, very rarely, someone will say they scan the code, maybe run the tests, check the open issues etc.

This is production code!

Sadly it's no surprise after we experienced left-pad case.

On Reddit it depends on how the karma was obtained.

Example questions:

- Did they gain all their karma in one post, or was it gradual? Gradual karma is better because it implies that they're probably not a troll.

- Did their karma come from the current subreddit or a different one? Just because you have karma from a popular sub doesn't mean you're a good contributor to a niche sub.

- How frequently are they downvoted? Frequent negative karma in even-handed subreddits is a bad sign.

- Does the user have good reputation in related subreddits?

So it's usually not the number that matters, but the context around that number and how it came to be. That said, usually these things only matter when a user is misbehaving: if you're a mod you need to know whether they're having a bad day, or if they have a history of breaking rules and trolling.

You get karma for posting pithy and non-controversial (pessimists might say groupthink agreeable) comments or posts.

As much as everyone claims the system is for rewarding on topic discussion, in reality it is used to award points to people who echo whatever is popular and to put wrong think at the bottom.

You can convey unpopular opinions on Reddit without getting downvoted. It just takes good wording and replying to the right post-- essentially what's required in real life: timing and tactfulness.

most mod positions are offered first to contributing members of a community, so with fake points might eventually come real fake power. see for example the gallowboop story, he farmed points literally stealing other people content, and went to be a mod on a lot of subreddits

Years ago, I saw an auction website where bidders placed bids in penny amounts. Supposedly, you could win an item at a fraction of the price of the product. Bidding was real time, and you won the auction if you held the bid for 15 seconds. You "spent" your bid and never got it back if you lost the auction.

You never got to see how many people was bidding against you, and I always wondered how you could know it wasn't the website jacking up the bid.

I am reminded of that scam every time I see a karma/upvote system.

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