[bootload]

'... I know karma isn't that important, but for someone to get 50 points just for making a topic like this while someone else has to make about 10 thoughtful comments or 5 good submissions somehow seems unfair ...'

Artifacts in the system are influencing the way people behave. I'll be searching or writing up an article on communities, karma and how the hunt for karma [0] can have unintended side effects. The solution(s) are not simple and time consuming. I think by observation [1], [2], [3] the problems revolve more around the structure of the allocation and assignment of karma.

Reference

[0] Remember when karma in /. was numerical, then they changed to a broad description that defined karma?

[1] reddit, 'The "Point" of Reddit? Sharing not Karma, the average quality of links submitted has declined.'

http://reddit.com/info/95zg/comments/c96u0

[2] reddit, 'The "Point" of Reddit? Sharing not Karma, They're also working on making the recommendation algorithm better ...'

http://reddit.com/info/95zg/comments/c96un

[3] reddit, 'The "Point" of Reddit? Sharing not Karma , but what I submit--the links, to have it simply dissappear in a sea of, well, a sea of whatever kind of makes my effort useless'

http://reddit.com/info/95zg/comments/c96sf

[BrandonM]

Okay, so you shouldn't actually vote this up. I'm curious if there's any way to avoid the phenomenon I have seen a lot lately (at least once a day) where someone creates a topic like this and it gets voted up a lot. I know karma isn't that important, but for someone to get 50 points just for making a topic like this while someone else has to make about 10 thoughtful comments or 5 good submissions somehow seems unfair.

Comments? Suggestions? Am I the only one who feels this way?

[whacked_new → BrandonM]

I believe this behavior, as well as a dozen others, are unavoidable given the current architecture of this news system, and in fact, pretty much every news system in existence. It's a side effect of how information aggregators with score work; the ones without score have a slew of other problems.

This actually took up a good portion of my app.

[zaidf]

If you do anything on this site to get more karma, you should reconsider your goals:)

[BrandonM → zaidf]

Those aren't my concerns. My concerns are seeing numerous such questions that don't really add a whole lot to the site, but seem to keep getting submitted regardless. Sure, some of them promote interesting discussions, but I think that if they somehow didn't give karma (obviously a hard problem), submissions like this wouldn't pop up as much.