• @Etterra@lemmy.world
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    481 year ago

    I never got the purpose of karma. You can’t spend it, it’s just a pointless number. A few subs used it, fire whatever reason, as a numbers threshold for entry, but getting karma was so trivially easy even without bots that it literally accomplished nothing in that regard.

    • @myusernameisokay@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Not that I ever cared about karma, but I can see why some people did. It plays into peoples need to be liked. Karma associates a number with how well your post is doing. Bigger number = more people liked your post. Basically quantifying how well liked your post is and then gamifying it.

      • Really that stat would have to be something like total karma divided by your number of posts, or number of views by logged in users on your posts. As a total number it’s meaningless. It’s like someone being a millionaire if humans were immortal. Are they really good at business, or have just been alive a long time?

    • @rolaulten@lemmy.world
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      181 year ago

      Your brain sees the reward (karma) and gets a hit of dopamine. In theory this creates a spiral of encouraging you to post more contet for more dopamine hits. More content pulls in more users…

    • Back in 2013-ish there was a bot that would convert your karma to crypto back when it was cheap enough to just throw around like that. That was the only time in my life that I was ever paid to post, and it was like $6. I wonder how much it would be if I were to find that wallet now, but that was on an account that no longer exists. Oh, well!