This is something I had neglected to think of. A reward/points system leads to bots farming for points, then selling the account. On the other hand, karma can be a good indicator to community moderators of weather that user isn’t just a spam account.
Edit: To clarify comment karma is a good metric for mods, not post karma. Its much harder to gain karma via comments because you can’t just repost r/oddlysatisfying shit, but that could change with GPT and open source LLMs.
Comment karma is harder to gain than post karma, which is why many Reddit mods (including me) use it as a metric instead of combined karma. That is what I intended to say. Sorry about the confusion.
This is something I had neglected to think of. A reward/points system leads to bots farming for points, then selling the account. On the other hand, karma can be a good indicator to community moderators of weather that user isn’t just a spam account.
Edit: To clarify comment karma is a good metric for mods, not post karma. Its much harder to gain karma via comments because you can’t just repost r/oddlysatisfying shit, but that could change with GPT and open source LLMs.
Spam/bot accounts easily gained more karma than average users. User history has always been the best identifier that an account is genuine.
Comment karma is harder to gain than post karma, which is why many Reddit mods (including me) use it as a metric instead of combined karma. That is what I intended to say. Sorry about the confusion.
What if there was shadow karma, that you can only see if you are a mod, and the user cannot?
That actually seems like a good idea! Account farms won’t be able to abuse the system anymore.