The foundations of social sites, even pseudo-anonymous ones, are built on signaling and skinner boxing with imaginary currency[1]. The prestige from being awar

The foundations of social sites, even pseudo-anonymous ones, are built on signaling and skinner boxing with imaginary currency[1]. The prestige from being awarded something, anything, from challenging competition at a community with strong participants is not without value. Quantopian successfully does something similar with HFT, although part of their shtick is accessible data and tooling. [1] Example: "/u/joebob has a lot of karma/likes/retweets, he must have generated a lot of content deemed valuable by this community to earn that.../u/joebob is actually Joseph Smith, who got a got a great job/exit/customer after becoming internet famous in this forum...I, too, will benefit if I collect a lot of that sweet, sweet karma...I don't think I'll derive as much benefit as /u/joesmith, but getting upvoted for articulating my thoughts is really fun."