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So many people don't understand this. It's not like accumulating 10,000 karma will get someone a free cup of coffee at Starbucks. I don't deliberately troll t

• MichaelDickens 9y ago
  I would actually take the opposite side of this, I think saying "karma is just fake internet points" is missing something important. Karma is a rough metric for social approval, and social approval is one of the most important things for people. Now, karma isn't actually that great of a measure of social approval (you're unlikely to encounter your downvoters in real life; it's easy to get karma by making short uncontroversial comments; etc.), but it still means something, and it makes perfect sense to me that people would care about how much karma they have.
  • jandrese 9y ago
    I would discourage using karma as any measure of worth for the reasons you described. If a user has lots of negative karma that might be something else, but a large positive karma may mean nothing more than the person has been active on the site for a long time and tends to post a lot and doesn't troll frequently. It doesn't mean they're super smart or some incredible subject matter expert or anything like that. They just have a lot of time to post and aren't a complete shithead. In fact site operators should put extra scrutiny towards accounts that accumulate karma too quickly. That could be a sign of bot activity or "account optimization" firms making a mockery of your reputation system.