
Confessions of a Reddit Karma Whore - nwrk
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3k359n/confessions-of-a-reddit-karma-whore
======
sverige
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.

~~~
vidarh
Your statement caused an immediate negative reaction for me not because it
isn't right for some people but because it is generalising your experiences
into assumptions about what is 'real' and what works for other people that
does not match my experience at all.

It took me years to realise that what made me unhappy was trying to maintain
these 'real' relationships out of a similar belief that it was what I needed.

It's not that I can't enjoy relationships with people face to face. I do
_sometimes_. But it takes a lot out of me. It drains me of energy. [sometimes
that's worth it; sometimes it's not; sometimes it'd be worth it but I just
don't have the energy.]

The relationships you don't consider real often makes me happier. They're as
meaningful to me as face to face relationships, but a lot less exhausting.

The right balance for me is to be close in 'real' life with a partner and my
son, and rely on my colleagues and the occasional other person for some
limited other face to face contact (and a day or so a week is enough, thank
you), and otherwise stick to myself in 'real' life and keep interactions
largely online.

Even then I often I prefer total solitude, and I'm _happier_ this way than I
ever was spending time with people for the sake of trying to be someone I'm
not.

Chasing 'Real relationships with actual, real people that you can see and
touch and talk to' can be as soul sucking and damaging as locking yourself in
if you're doing it just because you're made to think that's what you should be
doing.

Not everyone is like you.

~~~
scarygliders
I gave you an updoot because I am exactly like you.

We, are introverts.

Introverts can function in the real world, but only for short bursts at a
time. We can make friends, go to parties, even be the life and soul of a party
- but only for short bursts at a time, then you'll usually find us chilling
out somewhere quiet, recharging our metaphorical batteries.

A lot of people confuse introversy with being shy or timid or other negative
connotations, and they'd be incorrect.

There are many good articles on what being an introvert is and means. For
example [https://introvertspring.com/what-is-an-
introvert/](https://introvertspring.com/what-is-an-introvert/)

~~~
astrobe_
That may be more than just being an introvert, though. "Introverts" should
take a look at the Attachment theory [1] for maybe, a bigger picture.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_in_adults](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_in_adults)

~~~
dan00
Please just no, don’t put that kind of psychological illness label on
introvert people.

People are quite able to differentiate if they’re fearful if they’re under
people or just exhausted.

~~~
astrobe_
Is "introvert" a protected status, a badge of honor? Besides, the article
doesn't describe any particular "illness".

~~~
dan00
> Is "introvert" a protected status, a badge of honor?

I’ve no clue what you’re talking.

> Besides, the article doesn't describe any particular "illness".

Calling it illness might not have been the right term, but at least it’s some
kind of personal development which has gone a bit into the wrong direction.
And if that’s the reason why an introvert person isn’t going more out, isn’t
going to meet more people, then there’s something wrong with the introvert
person and perhaps this should then be changed with additional personal
development, perhaps some kind of therapy.

If that’s not what you meant, then fine, otherwise that’s the reason why I’m a
bit upset, because it puts introvert people into a light of wrongness, that
something has to be changed in them.

------
brownbat
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
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
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.

~~~
jakear
That would be interesting. Might have to add it to the backlog of “cool things
to look into implementing”. My main concern is if it would increase the echo-
chamberyness of social media.

~~~
davidivadavid
It definitely would, but I don't feel concerned about it. I think it's an
overrated "problem" that misunderstands what people fundamentally want (better
ways of building tight communities online).

The main problem I see with echo-chambers today is the culture war type of
thing. I think there could be interesting solutions to that: based on the
karma "distance", build clusters and adapt network topology so that you can
only discover clusters that are at a finite distance. Minimize risks of
conflict while letting people explore "fringe" ideas (for them).

------
czr
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
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.

~~~
chomp
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
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.

~~~
burger_moon
> Pretty much the only reason you post on 4chan is to reply to people and get
> replies from people

Just because there's no points, doesn't mean people don't get satisfaction
from people replying to them, or having your thread stay at the top with lots
of discussion.

Replying to threads bumps them to the top right? So having a thread high on
the page is a similar signal as point rankings right?

~~~
whymauri
Yeah, but the difference here is that exposure can also come from negative and
contrarian attention. So the dominant strategy for staying at the top of a
board is sometimes to be as controversial as possible. Basically, trolling.

From a meta perspective, I guess trolling-for-the-sake-of-trolling can be part
of the 'echo chamber.' However, at a surface level it remains antipodal to the
idea of 'following a narrative.'

~~~
Fleetingreef
>So the dominant strategy for staying at the top of a board is sometimes to be
as controversial as possible. Basically, trolling.

In my experience this varies wildly, both from board-to-board and between
imageboard sites in general.

One aspect is moderation.

The MO of 4chan moderation is to enforce US Law and a bare minimum of conduct
in such a manner that it is not noticeable to most posters. If you use a
browser extension which allows you to monitor deleted posts/threads, such as
4chanX, and have it monitor a thread where a poster is intentionally trying to
incite controversy in a manner which is not conducive to the topic or board
theme, they will generally get silently deleted. On their end, they may get
warned, banned, or no notification at all, but the deletion is primarily
effective because it deprives them of their exposure (also, ban evasion is
trivial, while keeping one's flamebait up is not).

Another aspect is the culture of each board, which varies wildly on 4chan. For
example, posting political and social flamebait on one of the slower, niche
boards will just as likely result in people silently reporting the bait and
not replying, or only reply to call out the post as flamebait (which is less
ideal, but generally ends the conversation chain). If the content is deleted
in a consistent and timely manner, the posters can establish norms, and can
more effectively handle borderline flamebait without devolving into a
flamewar.

Meanwhile, on faster boards, the larger number of trolls and people willing to
take the bait, along with the ephemerality from faster pace of thread birth
and death, results both in moderation being unable to keep up, and a need for
more moderation, usually in the form of "janitors" (board specific moderators
with limited powers). The more janitors, the more erratic the enforcement of
rules tends to be, especially for Global Rules 3 and 6. So there tends to be
greater animosity between moderation and posters on faster boards. The extreme
examples would be /b/, /r9k/, and /pol/, the latter two informally serving as
an outlet for (a)social and political posts which have proven to be
irresistible to discuss while simultaneously being rancorous enough to derail
almost any thread.

So to sum it up, trolling is more effective on the fastest and most vitriolic
boards, and less effective on the rest. IMHO, the best "proper" ways to
increase your exposure is to either post original content (with mixed success
on a good day), actively engage others in conversation that is at least
tangentially related, and if on a more image-oriented board, provide on-topic
content to bump the thread.

------
sytelus
> 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
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.

------
rahuldottech
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
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

------
_bxg1
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
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
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
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).

~~~
samhain
This is how I use it too, and I probably have a problem with it. I've set up
timers so that I don't use it more than a few hours a day.

Basically I've maxed out the filter on /r/all (yes, it's actually called
/r/all and there was a time when it wasn't...) And then I visit just the
communities that I'm interested in. I am subscribed to some of them, but I
don't use the home page at all.

------
333c
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
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

------
sureaboutthis
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
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.

------
RickJWagner
There is some serious truth in this article.

Karma/Likes are like tiny happy pills. Psychologists will be studying this for
decades to come.

------
mirimir
> 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
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)

------
egypturnash
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.

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

------
verisimilitudes
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.

~~~
labster
Ok, let me read one of your posts...

> Ultimately, in the pursuit of simplicity, a flag octet would be avoided, as
> all my thinking would leave half of it unused and that I find poor, and so
> the final format is as follows: sixteen octets indicate the IPv4 or IPv6
> address, with all zeroes indicating a system action; three octets represent
> the time, likely with fifteen bits representing the year as an integer and
> nine bits representing the day within that year; an octet has its top two
> bits determine if the request successfully completed and if the selector
> ended properly, with the latter six being used for a length of the only
> variable-length component, the selector itself.

Holy run-on sentence, Batman. You have two problems, the presentation of the
topics aren't all that engaging, and your writing style could use some
improvement. As a writer myself, I have to wonder how many revisions that went
through. I need at least three drafts with days between them before I publish
anything substantial.

Examples of real life applications might make it more interesting as well -- a
lot of the drama of HN stories are where the design didn't quite work in the
implementation.

~~~
verisimilitudes
>Holy run-on sentence, Batman.

I'm supposing you'd suggest I use a list format where each item is on its own
line, then? I may make that change.

>You have two problems, the presentation of the topics aren't all that
engaging, and your writing style could use some improvement. As a writer
myself, I have to wonder how many revisions that went through.

Some of my work goes through several revisions since publishing and some
hasn't gone under any yet.

>Examples of real life applications might make it more interesting as well --
a lot of the drama of HN stories are where the design didn't quite work in the
implementation.

This wasn't my most exciting article, by any means. I have a Common Lisp
library I've written that's rather well-documented. I suppose I could submit
that next, as something more interesting.

I appreciate the critique.

------
myaccount54673
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".

------
gadnuk
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.

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

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

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
I did not see a mention of /u/galloboob

~~~
crispsquirrel
It's for the best

------
monksy
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
> 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?

~~~
kibwen
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.

~~~
monksy
Right there! It's the acknowledgment that a tool that is thought to be
beneficial can have some extremely devastating outcomes.

------
rewq4321
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.

~~~
kochikame
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.

