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Confessions of a Reddit Karma Whore

225 points by nwrk 7y ago

rahuldottech 7y ago
The post mentions u/poem_for_your_prog, a truly talented writer and poet. Definitely one of my favorite Reddit personalities. Check out their Reddit profile here: https://www.reddit.com/user/Poem_for_your_sprog https://www.reddit.com/user/Poem_for_your_sprog Also worth taking a look at is u/Shitty_Watercolour: https://www.reddit.com/user/Shitty_Watercolour https://www.reddit.com/user/Shitty_Watercolour
- kochikame 7y ago
  u/poem-for-your-sprog replied to a comment of mine with a poem a few years ago and it was like a brush with celebrity for me
czr 7y ago
That was an excellent piece. I've done a similar thing on a much smaller scale (fighting for karma within niche subreddits), complete with the careful analysis of which content sources do best, which times of day are ideal, what kind of titles and themes cater most to the userbase... I ended up writing plenty of automation as well, to help me filter through the vast quantity of potential submissions and find those which would guarantee a top spot. Reddit is a nice confluence of several things that humans find addicting - semi-random rewards, detailed metrics, quick feedback, novel stimuli, all magnifying the power of underlying signal (social approval). None of that is specific to reddit, of course–every social website eventually becomes that same game, or dies. Unlike the OP, though, I didn't find it unhealthy. Compared to, say, video games, or TV, chasing karma was a much better hamster wheel to run on; it motivated the sort of careful analysis, planning, and diligence that I could eventually apply to real problems. My hope is that reddit (and reddit-like attention machines) push more strongly in this direction; the ideal feedback loop isn't one that spurs no addiction at all, but rather one for which addiction has net positive consequences.
- pojzon 7y ago
  Doesnt it all come down to finding the biggest echo chamber within a thread and posting something following the narrative ? Reddit is pretty much the definition of echo chamber on majority of subs. Tho i understand why from psychological point of view.
  - czr 7y ago
    I think it depends on the subreddit and topic. For cases where most people already have a strongly-held opinion (say, when discussing any culture-war topics on a one-sided sub), sure, giving a witty or rousing restatement of the predominant opinion is a cheap way to score points. For cases where strong pre-existing opinions are rare, a high-quality turns-out style refutation of the existing narrative can do just as well as an affirmation would. Not everything on reddit is culture war, though. there are plenty of peaceful subs out there where there's no narrative to echo.
    - brownbat 7y ago
      > a high-quality turns-out style refutation of the existing narrative... Ok, well played.
  - chomp 7y ago
    I don't want to sidetrack y'all's discussion but any user base curated social media platform is going to be an echo chamber, HN included. It's not a unique feature of just Reddit.
    - newen 7y ago
      Don't think so. 4chan encourages contrarian opinions because posters care about replies, not upvotes or likes. Pretty much the only reason you post on 4chan is to reply to people and get replies from people, i.e. the discussion itself. While, agreed that voting style sites like HN and Reddit encourages echo chambers by having a points system and making highly voted comments more visible. There might be some middle ground between these.
333c 7y ago
A year or two ago I did something similar but much less methodical. I collected about 200 questions (a mix of stolen, modified, and original) and used a cron-job to post several of them every morning (US time) to AskReddit. I ended up with multiple successful posts. I seemed to get at least 2-3 with a score in the thousands every week.
- hi5eyes 7y ago
  gaming reddits default subs to farm 1k+ karma/post was fun for a couple posts then you get it and move on step 1: follow news source that targeted subs hold in high regard step 2: post an article with a title that's going to cause lots of comments, grammatical/spelling errors always get the ball eolling step 3: wait for the karma to roll in
  - nexuist 7y ago
    eolling? Don't you mean rolling? ;)
- RickJWagner 7y ago
  Wow. Cool system.
RickJWagner 7y ago
There is some serious truth in this article. Karma/Likes are like tiny happy pills. Psychologists will be studying this for decades to come.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
sverige 7y ago
This is the money quote for me: "I shut myself up in my room. The further I removed myself from the people I knew in the real world, the further I descended into the minds of people I’ve never interacted with and would never meet again." It seems the author isn't even aware of how awful this is, since later he admits he's still a karma whore. I am thankful that I recognized what an abysmal facsimile of an actual life this sort of thing is when it was only Usenet. I had a similar addiction for a little less than a year in the mid-90s. It seriously damaged my marriage, and more than I realized at the time, in hindsight. Real relationships with actual, real people that you can see and touch and talk to are essential for a healthy life. If this statement causes a negative reaction, please ask yourself why. It needs your immediate attention.
- hartator 7y ago
  Reddit is made of real people too. Met multiple people there. Being miserable alone is not superior to being miserable on Reddit.
  - sverige 7y ago
    I agree with your statement as far as it goes. I met several people irl that I had known only on Usenet back in the 90s. My question is, what are your relationships with relatives like? What about friendships with people who live nearby and share similar interests? I recognize that not everyone has family that lives nearby, and some have lost their natural families, which is very difficult. And there many who are estranged from their families for various reasons. I was estranged from my family, but that improved greatly with some considerable (and still ongoing) effort on my part, even though some of them have diagnosed mental illnesses. I guess my point is that if you have family members, it is well worth it to try to salvage what you can. If you do not have any family, it is well worth it to try to make one. Yes, those family members could be found on Reddit. Better to make the effort to have "real-life" friends and family you can see and talk to and touch daily so you don't have to be miserable alone. It can be hard to see when you're in the midst of it, though.
    - 7y ago
brownbat 7y ago
Binary social feedback systems often run into the same issues - people game the system and people use downvotes to disagree. There's no nuance in positive sentiments either - people conflate upvotes with reputation. It makes me feel like early experiments with multi-variate moderation deserve a second look. I know that simpler systems generally increase engagement, that's probably why everyone (even Netflix) converged to a simple up / down model. But there might be simple ways to split out the types of feedback we're always worried about conflating. You could add little emoji or stickers below each post that are default grayed out, as an option instead of replying. One of them could be a "this makes me angry because I disagree"-sad-thunderstorm sticker. Another could be spam. That approach would funnel downvotes into separately bins for spam, low effort, and controversial. That sorting could nudge the crowd into providing much more useful feedback. People wouldn't have to ask why they were downvoted. Gaming would probably happen, but it'd be more diffuse. If there are multiple positive bins, not everyone is going to be gaming in the same way, they won't be comparable. Allowing this to be customizable on each subreddit could allow for some really crazy experiments. The unpopular opinion reddit could create a user interface that actually encourages the sort of voting they want, as opposed to constantly complaining that people are voting incorrectly.
- xiphias2 7y ago
  What I would like to see is a system which is still binary, but the people that I personally upvote matters. Just as an example I just upvoted you and I would like to see your future comments, I care less about how many people are upvoting a content and care more about who upvoted it, and whether that person is selective to upvote constructive content only.
  - davidivadavid 7y ago
    I've wondered for the longest time about the feasibility/consequences of having a recursive, private karma system (with decay). I upvote you, so I see your stuff, and more of the stuff you upvoted, and less of the stuff you downvoted. You can repeat the process recursively and add decay as you go further. Every user holds their own version of the karma network.
monksy 7y ago
Disclaimer: I don't think the reddit organization is responsible for this I do think the guy needs help. I think this is the WWI of our generation to realize how much computer technology can be a bad thing. We've had dark patterns influence behavior and the health of people. We've had strategies that are designed to hook unsuspecting people and we're seeing some serious repercussions out of it. Not sure what to suggest to do here. But I do find it concerning.
- burger_moon 7y ago
  > I think this is the WWI of our generation That's a weird analogy, could you explain that further? I don't really follow how living months in cold wet trenches, watching your friends get killed everyday and killing enemy soldiers relates to social media addiction?
  - bjourne 7y ago
    The analogy is that human lives are wasted. Karma whoring for years is no more productive than killing enemy soldiers. He doesn't see his friends get killed because he didn't have any in the first place.
  - petersellers 7y ago
    Before WWI, I don't think the world had yet grasped how horrifically effective industrialized countries were at killing enemy combatants. Not just killing either, but being able to sustain bloody conflicts for a very, very long time (being able to "take a punch" - to coin a phrase from Dan Carlin). WWI had many battles that individually had more casualties than entire past wars - it was shocking and it changed people's perception of war.
  - kibwen 7y ago
    I think the parent poster is referring to the technological explosion that preceded WWI, where social conventions about how war ought to be waged had yet to take into account the ruthless efficiency of modern warfare (tanks, cars, radio, telephone, submachine guns, planes, chemical weapons, flamethrowers, indirect-fire artillery). It was a 19th-century war fought with 20th-century technology; similarly, current generations are trying to reconcile 20th-century methods of social organization with 21st-century tech. I don't get the impression that they were literally trying to compare the experience of fighting in WWI to being on Reddit.
myaccount54673 7y ago
One of my favourite takeaways from this is that Reddit users are constantly poking fun at instagram and twitter for recycling reddit posts whereas in reality I estimate 75% of the content I see on the front page originated from one of those sites, posted by a "Karma Whore".
verisimilitudes 7y ago
This is the manner of thing I expect from Reddit. This is the most important paragraph, to me: ''The act of seeking karma is a sensitive issue on the site. Some users post original content, or stuff that they only make themselves. These users, Redditors will tell you, are respectable because their pursuit of karma is funded by their own work and energy. But the site’s system is volatile, and not all original content is well-received. Karma whores know this in their core. Karma whores learn to be clinical and bot-like. Karma whores make nothing themselves and often pull their content from users on other sites without crediting. This recklessness, Redditors will tell you, reveals the true emptiness dwelling inside these people.'' You see much of the same behaviour here. I've noticed this manner of website tends to avoid discussing the issues with upvotes and downvotes; they're only good in theory and are constantly abused in practice; discussions of gaming the system are also typically taboo. It's clear to any idiot that if you want Internet points on Hacker News, you simply spend time uploading the work of others and collecting the value ascribed to that which you had nothing to do with. The only reason I made this account was to promote my work to a wider audience, only to find that no one on ''Hacker'' ''News'' was interested in the least. None of my work has received even a single comment. That's another issue with voting systems; people are led to believe a vote may as well be a comment, so they don't write one. Anyway, the utter disgust and disappointment I've experienced and also seen secondhand for some others I hold in good regard towards this place has led me to implement my own comment system, so as to be free from trying to appeal to this place. I'd delete this account, being sick of this nonsense already, but it's my understanding the posts would remain indefinitely, so I'll keep this account to make posts such as this, giving my opinion on these things I find wrong here.
- skinnymuch 7y ago
  Your points may be valid but your post makes it seem like you’re mostly just upset your submissions didn’t get any recognition. I don’t think HN is a bastion of meritocracy or being amazing either FYI.
  - verisimilitudes 7y ago
    >Your points may be valid but your post makes it seem like you’re mostly just upset your submissions didn’t get any recognition. I'm certainly not pleased about it. >I don’t think HN is a bastion of meritocracy or being amazing either FYI. Part of the issue is with the name, perhaps. This website portrays itself as a hacker venue, but my Lisp and machine code articles receive nothing, whereas people wrapping HTML and JavaScript around programs others wrote, reimplementing something worse in Rust, or even commenting on something that happened on Reddit receives hundreds of comments and Internet points. I couldn't care less about the points, but surely you understand it would be frustrating for a place that claims to be about hackers to do this. Perhaps I wouldn't feel this way if it had remained Startup News. Of particular note and relevant to this main topic, I wasn't the first to submit my articles to Hacker News. Someone else was in an IRC channel with me discussing one of my projects and, in pursuit of Internet points, uploaded it without even asking me. To see my work put on Hacker News so someone could get points is one thing and then for it to be entirely ignored is an additional insult. Surely you understand some of how I feel, with this.
Crazyontap 7y ago
Replace karma with money, karma whoring as marketing / selling and reddit as IRL and this post would still be 100% spot on!
sureaboutthis 7y ago
I was a reddit troll. Or at least that's what they called me. It started when I got involved in a sub where I am a fairly well-known expert. I would correct people. Get blasted cause I wasn't nice or they thought my answer needed any number of corrections. Then it got to the point where the number of questions and comments were so out of the realm of reality I couldn't stand to read them. Then I started questioning people and I came to a stark realization. 80% of the people in several technology threads were kids under 18 years old--typically 15--and had no work experience in the field! But this is my point. Karma on reddit means less than nothing to anybody outside of reddit postings and, even then, it doesn't mean anything to 80% of all those people cause they won't look at or notice your karma anyway. So what's the point? What is the value in that? Despite my troll reputation, and you may know me, I still have nearly 10K in karma value. What does that tell you? When I'm in my social and family circles, I almost never hear anything about reddit and, when I do, it's always a joke about an insane posting where everyone laughs at how stupid it is. I'll never forget the comment of a reporter on NPR one day who stated, "Reddit is a Frankenstein's monster even they can't control".
- newen 7y ago
  That's actually typical reddit. If you go into almost any topic subreddit, especially the more popular topics, it will be filled with amateurs, non-experts, and teenagers. Expert voices get ignored, drowned out, or downvoted to invisibility because they don't even have the ability to recognize that it's an expert opinion.
egypturnash 7y ago
One of the niche subreddits I subscribe to had a post hit the front page a couple weeks ago, and ever since it's been constantly spammed with dumb jokey posts from one-day-old accounts. Reading this article makes me suspect I am seeing karma whores at work, hoping to come up with just the right dumb garbage to make this subreddit hit the front page again. It's so annoying.
_bxg1 7y ago
Man. It hasn't directly impacted other areas of my life, but I get a similar feeling from HN. Sometimes I have to log myself out to get out of the cycle.
- 300bps 7y ago
  reddit is uniquely designed to maximize time wasting. HN gets pretty boring for me after 15 minutes. reddit just keeps it interesting all day long. From my early days on BBSes to Usenet to IRC to Slashdot to digg, etc I’ve never witnessed anything as addictive as reddit. I stopped using it completely five years ago.
  - skinnymuch 7y ago
    To each his own? Reddit bores me fairly quickly except for a select view subreddits that are focused on videos. But that’s really just YouTube then. Is it even the reddit home page that is addictive to you? It might just be my cynicism but not believing most of the self posted stories that populate the front page, or, while I love dogs in real life, not caring for another dog photo, or, a post trying to pull at your heart strings. I don’t get the modern appeal of reddit. It’s of course a hugely popular site. The comments for big stories are usually filled with tepid jokes or repeating some part of the post or some meme. Or there’s a good chance a reddit post is just plain wrong or the comments are by and large uninformed. Most of my friends also by and large aren’t into reddit. But I recognize it’s a top 5 most popular site and so likely is addicting to a ton of people. On the other hand, while I waste too much time on H, I’ve never made any social connection here. This is the only social site where I spend substantial time and have no social connections at the end of it.
    - Sharlin 7y ago
      The default front page material is, frankly, subjectively terrible (damn kids these days get off my law etc.) But a customized front page can be really addictive, though these days I find myself just going directly to the various subreddits I frequent (things like r/AskScience, r/AskHistorians, r/photography, r/rust, r/dwarffortress).
leshow 7y ago
This type of blatant falsity is the reason I hate reddit. Everything is for it's appearances, nothing feels genuine.
mirimir 7y ago
> If another post was competing with mine to trend within the subreddit, I’d downvote it, and others, in an attempt to trigger the algorithm that would give mine a boost. I'd have thought that such behavior would be punished. As I understand it, HN goes further, looking for voting cabals and sock-puppet groups.
- kochikame 7y ago
  If it is found out, it is punished See the whole Unidan saga a few years back for how the mighty can fall once they get busted using sockpuppets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidan
sytelus 7y ago
> I began my Reddit career on some of the site's true crime communities What is fascinating that there are exactly zero advantage of having large karma racked up on reddit (or HN). Most likely this would in fact work against you. However, still, brain is wired up the maximize any social recognition it sees regardless of its usefulness or "realness". This is in same class as a drug addition where brain can't prevent itself from doing things even when it understands its not good for the being.
- AFascistWorld 7y ago
  Tencent's QQ have these online-time badges, you won't understand how much people want it, especially teens. It's like an honor that can be used to show off.
rewq4321 7y ago
Of course I'll get downvoted for this, but in any case: I expect the pejorative use of "whore" from 13 year olds in youtube comment sections, but less so from a front-page hacker news post.
- toby- 7y ago
  It's Vice; if it wasn't written by a 13-year-old, rest assured it was written by somebody with the maturity of one. ;)
- kochikame 7y ago
  But, that's what those people are commonly called; "karma whores". It's not like the writers of the article are trying to insult them. They're just using the name that everyone uses for them.
netmonk 7y ago
He could have done better, sharing his knowledges and experiences on StackOverflow.
ryanwaldorf 7y ago
Seems like a good personal marketing piece. I’d consult him to help get social media posts viral
qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago
I did not see a mention of /u/galloboob
- crispsquirrel 7y ago
  It's for the best
gadnuk 7y ago
I did something very similar to this on Blind. I lurked on that app for months and the very first post I made blew up. The dopamine hit was such that the next few months were spent in getting as many Blind points as possible. Pretty sure that if there was a leaderboard, I was at the top of it for at least some time. And then one fine day I realized that all the effort was pretty points. Just like Reddit karma, Blind points had no value. Deleted the app, deleted accounts on all social media (Facebook, Instagram, etc) and life has been pretty much good since then.

225 points by nwrk 7y ago

The post mentions u/poem_for_your_prog, a truly talented writer and poet. Definitely one of my favorite Reddit personalities. Check out their Reddit profile here: https://www.reddit.com/user/Poem_for_your_sprog https://www.reddit.com/user/Poem_for_your_sprog Also worth taking a look at is u/Shitty_Watercolour: https://www.reddit.com/user/Shitty_Watercolour https://www.reddit.com/user/Shitty_Watercolour

kochikame 7y ago
u/poem-for-your-sprog replied to a comment of mine with a poem a few years ago and it was like a brush with celebrity for me

czr 7y ago

That was an excellent piece. I've done a similar thing on a much smaller scale (fighting for karma within niche subreddits), complete with the careful analysis of which content sources do best, which times of day are ideal, what kind of titles and themes cater most to the userbase... I ended up writing plenty of automation as well, to help me filter through the vast quantity of potential submissions and find those which would guarantee a top spot. Reddit is a nice confluence of several things that humans find addicting - semi-random rewards, detailed metrics, quick feedback, novel stimuli, all magnifying the power of underlying signal (social approval). None of that is specific to reddit, of course–every social website eventually becomes that same game, or dies. Unlike the OP, though, I didn't find it unhealthy. Compared to, say, video games, or TV, chasing karma was a much better hamster wheel to run on; it motivated the sort of careful analysis, planning, and diligence that I could eventually apply to real problems. My hope is that reddit (and reddit-like attention machines) push more strongly in this direction; the ideal feedback loop isn't one that spurs no addiction at all, but rather one for which addiction has net positive consequences.

pojzon 7y ago
Doesnt it all come down to finding the biggest echo chamber within a thread and posting something following the narrative ? Reddit is pretty much the definition of echo chamber on majority of subs. Tho i understand why from psychological point of view.
- czr 7y ago
  I think it depends on the subreddit and topic. For cases where most people already have a strongly-held opinion (say, when discussing any culture-war topics on a one-sided sub), sure, giving a witty or rousing restatement of the predominant opinion is a cheap way to score points. For cases where strong pre-existing opinions are rare, a high-quality turns-out style refutation of the existing narrative can do just as well as an affirmation would. Not everything on reddit is culture war, though. there are plenty of peaceful subs out there where there's no narrative to echo.
  - brownbat 7y ago
    > a high-quality turns-out style refutation of the existing narrative... Ok, well played.
- chomp 7y ago
  I don't want to sidetrack y'all's discussion but any user base curated social media platform is going to be an echo chamber, HN included. It's not a unique feature of just Reddit.
  - newen 7y ago
    Don't think so. 4chan encourages contrarian opinions because posters care about replies, not upvotes or likes. Pretty much the only reason you post on 4chan is to reply to people and get replies from people, i.e. the discussion itself. While, agreed that voting style sites like HN and Reddit encourages echo chambers by having a points system and making highly voted comments more visible. There might be some middle ground between these.

333c 7y ago

A year or two ago I did something similar but much less methodical. I collected about 200 questions (a mix of stolen, modified, and original) and used a cron-job to post several of them every morning (US time) to AskReddit. I ended up with multiple successful posts. I seemed to get at least 2-3 with a score in the thousands every week.

hi5eyes 7y ago
gaming reddits default subs to farm 1k+ karma/post was fun for a couple posts then you get it and move on step 1: follow news source that targeted subs hold in high regard step 2: post an article with a title that's going to cause lots of comments, grammatical/spelling errors always get the ball eolling step 3: wait for the karma to roll in
- nexuist 7y ago
  eolling? Don't you mean rolling? ;)
RickJWagner 7y ago
Wow. Cool system.

RickJWagner 7y ago

There is some serious truth in this article. Karma/Likes are like tiny happy pills. Psychologists will be studying this for decades to come.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

sverige 7y ago

This is the money quote for me: "I shut myself up in my room. The further I removed myself from the people I knew in the real world, the further I descended into the minds of people I’ve never interacted with and would never meet again." It seems the author isn't even aware of how awful this is, since later he admits he's still a karma whore. I am thankful that I recognized what an abysmal facsimile of an actual life this sort of thing is when it was only Usenet. I had a similar addiction for a little less than a year in the mid-90s. It seriously damaged my marriage, and more than I realized at the time, in hindsight. Real relationships with actual, real people that you can see and touch and talk to are essential for a healthy life. If this statement causes a negative reaction, please ask yourself why. It needs your immediate attention.

hartator 7y ago
Reddit is made of real people too. Met multiple people there. Being miserable alone is not superior to being miserable on Reddit.
- sverige 7y ago
  I agree with your statement as far as it goes. I met several people irl that I had known only on Usenet back in the 90s. My question is, what are your relationships with relatives like? What about friendships with people who live nearby and share similar interests? I recognize that not everyone has family that lives nearby, and some have lost their natural families, which is very difficult. And there many who are estranged from their families for various reasons. I was estranged from my family, but that improved greatly with some considerable (and still ongoing) effort on my part, even though some of them have diagnosed mental illnesses. I guess my point is that if you have family members, it is well worth it to try to salvage what you can. If you do not have any family, it is well worth it to try to make one. Yes, those family members could be found on Reddit. Better to make the effort to have "real-life" friends and family you can see and talk to and touch daily so you don't have to be miserable alone. It can be hard to see when you're in the midst of it, though.
  - 7y ago

brownbat 7y ago

Binary social feedback systems often run into the same issues - people game the system and people use downvotes to disagree. There's no nuance in positive sentiments either - people conflate upvotes with reputation. It makes me feel like early experiments with multi-variate moderation deserve a second look. I know that simpler systems generally increase engagement, that's probably why everyone (even Netflix) converged to a simple up / down model. But there might be simple ways to split out the types of feedback we're always worried about conflating. You could add little emoji or stickers below each post that are default grayed out, as an option instead of replying. One of them could be a "this makes me angry because I disagree"-sad-thunderstorm sticker. Another could be spam. That approach would funnel downvotes into separately bins for spam, low effort, and controversial. That sorting could nudge the crowd into providing much more useful feedback. People wouldn't have to ask why they were downvoted. Gaming would probably happen, but it'd be more diffuse. If there are multiple positive bins, not everyone is going to be gaming in the same way, they won't be comparable. Allowing this to be customizable on each subreddit could allow for some really crazy experiments. The unpopular opinion reddit could create a user interface that actually encourages the sort of voting they want, as opposed to constantly complaining that people are voting incorrectly.

xiphias2 7y ago
What I would like to see is a system which is still binary, but the people that I personally upvote matters. Just as an example I just upvoted you and I would like to see your future comments, I care less about how many people are upvoting a content and care more about who upvoted it, and whether that person is selective to upvote constructive content only.
- davidivadavid 7y ago
  I've wondered for the longest time about the feasibility/consequences of having a recursive, private karma system (with decay). I upvote you, so I see your stuff, and more of the stuff you upvoted, and less of the stuff you downvoted. You can repeat the process recursively and add decay as you go further. Every user holds their own version of the karma network.

monksy 7y ago

Disclaimer: I don't think the reddit organization is responsible for this I do think the guy needs help. I think this is the WWI of our generation to realize how much computer technology can be a bad thing. We've had dark patterns influence behavior and the health of people. We've had strategies that are designed to hook unsuspecting people and we're seeing some serious repercussions out of it. Not sure what to suggest to do here. But I do find it concerning.

burger_moon 7y ago
> I think this is the WWI of our generation That's a weird analogy, could you explain that further? I don't really follow how living months in cold wet trenches, watching your friends get killed everyday and killing enemy soldiers relates to social media addiction?
- bjourne 7y ago
  The analogy is that human lives are wasted. Karma whoring for years is no more productive than killing enemy soldiers. He doesn't see his friends get killed because he didn't have any in the first place.
- petersellers 7y ago
  Before WWI, I don't think the world had yet grasped how horrifically effective industrialized countries were at killing enemy combatants. Not just killing either, but being able to sustain bloody conflicts for a very, very long time (being able to "take a punch" - to coin a phrase from Dan Carlin). WWI had many battles that individually had more casualties than entire past wars - it was shocking and it changed people's perception of war.
- kibwen 7y ago
  I think the parent poster is referring to the technological explosion that preceded WWI, where social conventions about how war ought to be waged had yet to take into account the ruthless efficiency of modern warfare (tanks, cars, radio, telephone, submachine guns, planes, chemical weapons, flamethrowers, indirect-fire artillery). It was a 19th-century war fought with 20th-century technology; similarly, current generations are trying to reconcile 20th-century methods of social organization with 21st-century tech. I don't get the impression that they were literally trying to compare the experience of fighting in WWI to being on Reddit.

myaccount54673 7y ago

One of my favourite takeaways from this is that Reddit users are constantly poking fun at instagram and twitter for recycling reddit posts whereas in reality I estimate 75% of the content I see on the front page originated from one of those sites, posted by a "Karma Whore".

verisimilitudes 7y ago

This is the manner of thing I expect from Reddit. This is the most important paragraph, to me: ''The act of seeking karma is a sensitive issue on the site. Some users post original content, or stuff that they only make themselves. These users, Redditors will tell you, are respectable because their pursuit of karma is funded by their own work and energy. But the site’s system is volatile, and not all original content is well-received. Karma whores know this in their core. Karma whores learn to be clinical and bot-like. Karma whores make nothing themselves and often pull their content from users on other sites without crediting. This recklessness, Redditors will tell you, reveals the true emptiness dwelling inside these people.'' You see much of the same behaviour here. I've noticed this manner of website tends to avoid discussing the issues with upvotes and downvotes; they're only good in theory and are constantly abused in practice; discussions of gaming the system are also typically taboo. It's clear to any idiot that if you want Internet points on Hacker News, you simply spend time uploading the work of others and collecting the value ascribed to that which you had nothing to do with. The only reason I made this account was to promote my work to a wider audience, only to find that no one on ''Hacker'' ''News'' was interested in the least. None of my work has received even a single comment. That's another issue with voting systems; people are led to believe a vote may as well be a comment, so they don't write one. Anyway, the utter disgust and disappointment I've experienced and also seen secondhand for some others I hold in good regard towards this place has led me to implement my own comment system, so as to be free from trying to appeal to this place. I'd delete this account, being sick of this nonsense already, but it's my understanding the posts would remain indefinitely, so I'll keep this account to make posts such as this, giving my opinion on these things I find wrong here.

skinnymuch 7y ago
Your points may be valid but your post makes it seem like you’re mostly just upset your submissions didn’t get any recognition. I don’t think HN is a bastion of meritocracy or being amazing either FYI.
- verisimilitudes 7y ago
  >Your points may be valid but your post makes it seem like you’re mostly just upset your submissions didn’t get any recognition. I'm certainly not pleased about it. >I don’t think HN is a bastion of meritocracy or being amazing either FYI. Part of the issue is with the name, perhaps. This website portrays itself as a hacker venue, but my Lisp and machine code articles receive nothing, whereas people wrapping HTML and JavaScript around programs others wrote, reimplementing something worse in Rust, or even commenting on something that happened on Reddit receives hundreds of comments and Internet points. I couldn't care less about the points, but surely you understand it would be frustrating for a place that claims to be about hackers to do this. Perhaps I wouldn't feel this way if it had remained Startup News. Of particular note and relevant to this main topic, I wasn't the first to submit my articles to Hacker News. Someone else was in an IRC channel with me discussing one of my projects and, in pursuit of Internet points, uploaded it without even asking me. To see my work put on Hacker News so someone could get points is one thing and then for it to be entirely ignored is an additional insult. Surely you understand some of how I feel, with this.

Crazyontap 7y ago

Replace karma with money, karma whoring as marketing / selling and reddit as IRL and this post would still be 100% spot on!

sureaboutthis 7y ago

I was a reddit troll. Or at least that's what they called me. It started when I got involved in a sub where I am a fairly well-known expert. I would correct people. Get blasted cause I wasn't nice or they thought my answer needed any number of corrections. Then it got to the point where the number of questions and comments were so out of the realm of reality I couldn't stand to read them. Then I started questioning people and I came to a stark realization. 80% of the people in several technology threads were kids under 18 years old--typically 15--and had no work experience in the field! But this is my point. Karma on reddit means less than nothing to anybody outside of reddit postings and, even then, it doesn't mean anything to 80% of all those people cause they won't look at or notice your karma anyway. So what's the point? What is the value in that? Despite my troll reputation, and you may know me, I still have nearly 10K in karma value. What does that tell you? When I'm in my social and family circles, I almost never hear anything about reddit and, when I do, it's always a joke about an insane posting where everyone laughs at how stupid it is. I'll never forget the comment of a reporter on NPR one day who stated, "Reddit is a Frankenstein's monster even they can't control".

newen 7y ago
That's actually typical reddit. If you go into almost any topic subreddit, especially the more popular topics, it will be filled with amateurs, non-experts, and teenagers. Expert voices get ignored, drowned out, or downvoted to invisibility because they don't even have the ability to recognize that it's an expert opinion.

egypturnash 7y ago

One of the niche subreddits I subscribe to had a post hit the front page a couple weeks ago, and ever since it's been constantly spammed with dumb jokey posts from one-day-old accounts. Reading this article makes me suspect I am seeing karma whores at work, hoping to come up with just the right dumb garbage to make this subreddit hit the front page again. It's so annoying.

_bxg1 7y ago

Man. It hasn't directly impacted other areas of my life, but I get a similar feeling from HN. Sometimes I have to log myself out to get out of the cycle.

300bps 7y ago
reddit is uniquely designed to maximize time wasting. HN gets pretty boring for me after 15 minutes. reddit just keeps it interesting all day long. From my early days on BBSes to Usenet to IRC to Slashdot to digg, etc I’ve never witnessed anything as addictive as reddit. I stopped using it completely five years ago.
- skinnymuch 7y ago
  To each his own? Reddit bores me fairly quickly except for a select view subreddits that are focused on videos. But that’s really just YouTube then. Is it even the reddit home page that is addictive to you? It might just be my cynicism but not believing most of the self posted stories that populate the front page, or, while I love dogs in real life, not caring for another dog photo, or, a post trying to pull at your heart strings. I don’t get the modern appeal of reddit. It’s of course a hugely popular site. The comments for big stories are usually filled with tepid jokes or repeating some part of the post or some meme. Or there’s a good chance a reddit post is just plain wrong or the comments are by and large uninformed. Most of my friends also by and large aren’t into reddit. But I recognize it’s a top 5 most popular site and so likely is addicting to a ton of people. On the other hand, while I waste too much time on H, I’ve never made any social connection here. This is the only social site where I spend substantial time and have no social connections at the end of it.
  - Sharlin 7y ago
    The default front page material is, frankly, subjectively terrible (damn kids these days get off my law etc.) But a customized front page can be really addictive, though these days I find myself just going directly to the various subreddits I frequent (things like r/AskScience, r/AskHistorians, r/photography, r/rust, r/dwarffortress).

leshow 7y ago

This type of blatant falsity is the reason I hate reddit. Everything is for it's appearances, nothing feels genuine.

mirimir 7y ago

> If another post was competing with mine to trend within the subreddit, I’d downvote it, and others, in an attempt to trigger the algorithm that would give mine a boost. I'd have thought that such behavior would be punished. As I understand it, HN goes further, looking for voting cabals and sock-puppet groups.

kochikame 7y ago
If it is found out, it is punished See the whole Unidan saga a few years back for how the mighty can fall once they get busted using sockpuppets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidan

sytelus 7y ago

> I began my Reddit career on some of the site's true crime communities What is fascinating that there are exactly zero advantage of having large karma racked up on reddit (or HN). Most likely this would in fact work against you. However, still, brain is wired up the maximize any social recognition it sees regardless of its usefulness or "realness". This is in same class as a drug addition where brain can't prevent itself from doing things even when it understands its not good for the being.

AFascistWorld 7y ago
Tencent's QQ have these online-time badges, you won't understand how much people want it, especially teens. It's like an honor that can be used to show off.

rewq4321 7y ago

Of course I'll get downvoted for this, but in any case: I expect the pejorative use of "whore" from 13 year olds in youtube comment sections, but less so from a front-page hacker news post.

toby- 7y ago
It's Vice; if it wasn't written by a 13-year-old, rest assured it was written by somebody with the maturity of one. ;)
kochikame 7y ago
But, that's what those people are commonly called; "karma whores". It's not like the writers of the article are trying to insult them. They're just using the name that everyone uses for them.

netmonk 7y ago

He could have done better, sharing his knowledges and experiences on StackOverflow.

ryanwaldorf 7y ago

Seems like a good personal marketing piece. I’d consult him to help get social media posts viral

qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago

I did not see a mention of /u/galloboob

crispsquirrel 7y ago
It's for the best

gadnuk 7y ago

I did something very similar to this on Blind. I lurked on that app for months and the very first post I made blew up. The dopamine hit was such that the next few months were spent in getting as many Blind points as possible. Pretty sure that if there was a leaderboard, I was at the top of it for at least some time. And then one fine day I realized that all the effort was pretty points. Just like Reddit karma, Blind points had no value. Deleted the app, deleted accounts on all social media (Facebook, Instagram, etc) and life has been pretty much good since then.