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View submission: A Guide to Reddit Lingo
- Karma Farming
You will come across Subreddits which offer Karma for no or little effort. These are easy enough to spot from their names, and don’t be tempted by them no matter what you might read there. They can be easy traps to fall into, because some of those upvote scores look amazing to a new user, but new users actually don’t get those significant upvotes for the reasons detailed later.
Posting in subreddits meant for “gaming” the Reddit system can and will get you banned from participating in some major subreddits that you may want - or need - to use in the future because a lot of moderators see them as a way of circumventing karma requirements to post or comment in their community.
The Reddit CEO made a statement about Karma farming[1]: *The answer is right now we’re in between a rock and a hard place. We want new users to be able to discover Reddit, but aggressive karma rules, which mods set up when Reddit had very limited tools, make it very hard for first-time users to contribute. Karma farms are a bad solution to this, which is why we’re working on tools like Crowd Control that limit the damage bad actors can cause without overly punishing well-meaning new users. I've been proposing an idea around karma reciprocity - letting communities take into account a user's karma in other communities.*
Avoid them. The few upvotes you’ll get there aren’t worth the risk. See Also: Cakeday, Rules of this Subreddit[2].
- Karma Farms
You may have seen warnings about posting in subreddits that exist solely to offer Reddit Karma for little to no effort. Here’s a short explanation why.
Unfortunately, most people in the Karma farm types of sub have no real interest in participating widely in Reddit, and are just there to collect numbers. Most new users don’t actually get that many upvotes from those subs and there’s a reason for that: those subs aren’t just for regular new people looking for early Karma or even affirmation. They’re widely used by marketers and political groups with things to promote illicitly on Reddit.
Karma farms perpetuate fake accounts - Bots with no real intention of engaging at all on Reddit but exist solely to farm karma for their other Bot Alts. Spambots are a very real problem on Reddit. They’re not hard to spot once you do a little digging as the pictures they post (when they do) are just quickly farmed from Google pretending to be from an actual person. But they rely on the fact that most of us don’t check everyone’s profile or history before responding to them. With enough votes, a fake profile can appear real enough to trick people, and apparently this is causing some mayhem and a real problem in the subs that deal with stocks and cryptocurrencies.
This should alert you to why this level of Karma farming happens: there is real life money involved.
Promotional companies that want to do "organic advertising" or political astroturfing need older accounts with lots of karma to appear legitimate, and so do the sketchy companies who want you to go to their malware, dodgy advertisement, dropship, phishing or credit-card scam sites. Many of the higher scoring posts in Karma farms will be bot or Alt accounts engaged in a “voting-go-round” with each other to increase their karma to pass the minimum requirements that exist on most big subs. This in turn will increase their credibility to post items such as T-Shirts, posters, mugs or other ephemerals with an innocuous caption saying things like “Got this for a friend” or “Look what arrived today”. Fall for one of those posts at your peril.
These farmed profiles are also being sold to people who want to seem legitimate to have influence in Reddit, especially in subs with real-life money or influence involved. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the very sketchy redditsecrets.com (with your Adblock firmly on) and realise why most subs have an anti-spambot filter and mods with a heavy banhammer. That is just one of the grey market sites out there. There is a lot more information and discussion here[3] about this issue, and more details in Spambots: Special Note[4].
4: https://www.reddit.com/r/NewToReddit/comments/lw4gp4/a_guide_to_reddit_lingo/guez6zw/
If you are at all serious about being on Reddit, you need to build up karma in the same way we all did - slowly but quality. Reddit is not a “race to the top”, it’s there to be enjoyed for what it is - a content sharing platform where you decide what level of interaction you want with other Redditors. Just set out to be a good person, and think of your karma as being your internet legacy.
6: https://www.reddit.com/r/NewToReddit/comments/lw4gp4/a_guide_to_reddit_lingo/guez6zw/
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