Some people farm karma, invest in their avatars as a way to show off legitimately. Its a feel good thing. Nothing against it, others also sell their accounts to troll farms for trolls to use for their agenda or advertising, an account that has high karma might appear attractive to those people and could have some significant value for them. Imagine if a troll farm agency whose whole business is to push agenda in r/Philippines and its threatened to closed down the other alternative is lemmy which at the moment does not have that wide spread impact due to low users.