A few examples include s*x questions on askreddit, “this” comments, nolife powermods, jokes being more frequent than actual answers

  • @Gsus4
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    1 year ago

    It’s not so much a dark pattern, but an emergent property of the upvote system: usually the first commenters tended to have an advantage and late good comments actually would never get enough exposure to float to the top.

    Karma farmers would just sit at “new”, spam comments and get visibility for joke and outrage comments.

    The solution may be to randomly order comments below a certain threshold and/or within an upvote range.

      • @Gsus4
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        1 year ago

        Karma still exists even when you don’t see the number, because it is used to sort posts in some way (by number or upvote percentage). Upvotes are important information to the community in principle.