Karma experiment

https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/hmd17x/karma_experiment/

created by plgrmonedge on 06/07/2020 at 18:21 UTC*

159 upvotes, 130 top-level comments (showing 25)

Hey mods,

Later today, we’ll be announcing a new karma experiment on r/changelog. The TLDR is that users will gain “award karma” when they give or receive awards. Users will get more karma when they receive awards with higher coin costs. Users who give awards will get karma based on both the coin cost and how early they are in awarding a post or a comment. Our goals with this change are to recognize awarding as a key part of the Reddit community and to drive more of it, while ensuring that your existing systems (in particular, automod) continue to run uninterrupted. Awarding is an important part of our direct-to-consumer revenue; it complements advertising revenue and gives us a strong footing to pursue our mission into the future. By giving awards, users not only recognize others but also help Reddit in its mission to bring more community and belonging to the world.

Normally, we don’t announce experiments because we conduct so many. In this case, we wanted to give you details to address any concerns on the experiment’s impact on moderation and automod. Here are a few important things to know:

We’ll stick around to answer your questions and to hear your thoughts on how karma can encourage good use of awards, including community awards.

~~EDIT: We are aware that comments and our replies are not showing up on the post. Our infra team is aware - please be patient. We are meanwhile responding to your comments as best we can.~~

EDIT2: Comments should be fixed now, thank you for your patience.

Comments

Comment by preludeoflight at 06/07/2020 at 18:26 UTC

666 upvotes, 12 direct replies

I am of the opinion that the users that clamor for karma aren't the types of people that make communities good. They just go for the mass-appeal, low hanging fruit comments that tend to garner lots of upvotes for a silly score that doesn't matter at all.

This change would just inflate the perceived "value", and just give one more thing to the people who already chase those numbers. It'll just, in my belief, increase the number of posts that are fishing for awards and upvotes.

But maybe I'm in the minority here, as a low-karma user (who has no desire to 'chase' those numbers) myself.

Comment by MajorParadox at 06/07/2020 at 18:24 UTC

258 upvotes, 3 direct replies

My first thought is this can be used by spammers to buy karma to make their ads move up in the algorithm

Comment by CedarWolf at 06/07/2020 at 19:05 UTC

352 upvotes, 14 direct replies

So let me get this straight. The mods, the people who do 90% of the work keeping this site in order, for free, have been clamoring for months about how the awards system needs a MAJOR overhaul because it's so easy to abuse in order to send hateful messages to people, and your response is 'My stars, we should encourage *more* abuse with awards! Let's make it even *easier* for people to abuse the awards system!'

Is that how this is supposed to sound? Because that's how it sounds. I'm not trying to be angry, here, I'm legitimately confused because it feels like we, the users, told you specifically to avoid doing this sort of thing, and y'all immediately turned around and doubled down on it.

How does that make any sense?

Comment by sandman730 at 06/07/2020 at 18:27 UTC

165 upvotes, 4 direct replies

So, you can now literally buy karma?

Comment by [deleted] at 06/07/2020 at 19:07 UTC*

45 upvotes, 1 direct replies

[deleted]

Comment by DrewsephA at 06/07/2020 at 19:12 UTC

59 upvotes, 3 direct replies

As long as this has *absolutely* **no** effect on anything besides that 3rd category on a user's profile page, so *no* change to posting algorithms, *no* change to rate-limits, *no* change to post rankings, literally nothing except that one, single line of numbers, I don't think this is a bad thing.

As soon as it starts to affect how/where/when your posts/comments appear, then it becomes a problem. So as long as it actually stays the way you guys say it will, I say go for it.

Comment by omnisephiroth at 06/07/2020 at 19:18 UTC

24 upvotes, 1 direct replies

My general feeling is that “Award Karma” should be tracked separately. I understand the importance of revenue that this generates for Reddit. But I also think that people with disposable income can pay to drown out people without that income. Which—to me—represents a trend away from Reddit’s best feature. While I’m sure you’ve all had meetings and discussed this for weeks, I want to *know* how you plan to handle what is essentially “buying karma.”

Comment by Security_Chief_Odo at 06/07/2020 at 19:14 UTC*

42 upvotes, 1 direct replies

users will gain “award karma” when they give or receive awards
award karma will be added to the total karma and shown as a separate category in the user profile.
Our goals with this change are to recognize awarding as a key part of the Reddit community and to drive more of it

Wow... what a profoundly stupid idea.

Because the track record so far has been stellar in regards to karma farming, vote manipulation, and briganding. Let's add another avenue to the mix. Awards are not a key part of the reddit community. They're a key part of your business strategy. At least be clear about that part.

Comment by eganist at 06/07/2020 at 22:33 UTC*

19 upvotes, 0 direct replies

/u/plgrmonedge

/r/relationship_advice has been begging for the option to plainly disable karma accrual for text submissions (self posts) ever since karma for text submissions was forced on for all of reddit. We have a massive karmafarming problem as a result, and nothing we've been able to do has managed to stop it.

What does it take for a simple checkbox to be considered that disables karma accrual for self posts? Because it's pretty unhealthy for our subreddit to continue to exist so long as selfpost karma is enabled.

We're not asking for much. Just a checkbox in settings. An intern can do it.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And back on topic, ***please for the love of god let us disable Award Karma for Relationship Advice if you ship it.*** Award Karma *will* wreck our subreddit.

Comment by x647 at 06/07/2020 at 18:24 UTC

15 upvotes, 1 direct replies

And this is for both Sub specific awards as well as reddit created awards?

Comment by eaglebtc at 06/07/2020 at 19:51 UTC

13 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Echoing another mod who said that subreddits have comment karma thresholds that will be abused by this system of award giving to/from new accounts. Reddit makes money from awards, so they have little incentive to curb this behavior.

Comment by Anofles at 06/07/2020 at 21:05 UTC

12 upvotes, 1 direct replies

So uh, did anyone even ask for this?

Comment by [deleted] at 06/07/2020 at 22:17 UTC

10 upvotes, 1 direct replies

[deleted]

Comment by CaptainPedge at 06/07/2020 at 19:56 UTC

52 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Congrats! You just made reddit pay-to-win. Fuck you

Comment by [deleted] at 06/07/2020 at 18:23 UTC

43 upvotes, 3 direct replies

I assume this has been approved by the Karma Chameleon[1]?

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmcA9LIIXWw

Comment by Georgy_K_Zhukov at 06/07/2020 at 18:34 UTC

9 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Two questions:

1. Does this 'award karma' only impact the total karma a user has as impacted in their 'Karma Score', or does it also act as a super upvote for the post/comment that is awarded? That is to say, f I give an award that is worth 100 karma, will it be the same as upvoting that post/comment 100 times in terms of its score, or would it only be +100 for the *user's* score but not impact the score of the post/comment?

2. Related, and depending on the answer to the first, will this in any way impact the Hot/Top/Best 'sort'? i.e. giving an award worth 100 Karma, would it change the *sort* in the same way as it the comment/post had received 100 upvotes, irrespective of how it impacts the actual, visible comment/post score?

Comment by 316nuts at 06/07/2020 at 21:15 UTC

11 upvotes, 0 direct replies

When do I got mod karma for taking out the spam trash

Comment by [deleted] at 07/07/2020 at 01:31 UTC

9 upvotes, 0 direct replies

You know, I’ve been here a long time. I’ve nodded a lot of communities from jokes to dirtbag meta to a local sub I really care about and this website has consistently never cared about mods or mod issues. Nothing has materially changed for us, we still don’t have robust mod tools and if anything admins have gotten less responsive to reports of users harassing us and spamming.

This change fucking sucks, you’re just telling us how you’ll make more money while we’re expected to do the shit work for free.

Comment by jhill515 at 06/07/2020 at 19:30 UTC

10 upvotes, 1 direct replies

So on my sub, I frequently screen spam posts, and the first way to check is Karma and age. If it's a young account with high karma, I start having to dig through their post/comment history; this is rare.

But, this sort of seems like people can just buy karma, and I expect my manual screening to take much more time.

Comment by Halaku at 06/07/2020 at 18:28 UTC

25 upvotes, 1 direct replies

So, will "Award Karma" be a third category along with "Link Karma" and "Comment Karma"?

Comment by TheTurtleBear at 06/07/2020 at 19:23 UTC

23 upvotes, 0 direct replies

This is such an abysmally bad idea. This is just a blatant attempt at getting people to spend more money, at the cost of encouraging karma farming even more. Awards are already ridiculous, this is jumping the shark entirely, you're allowing people to straight up buy karma

Comment by shiruken at 06/07/2020 at 19:16 UTC

16 upvotes, 2 direct replies

Is there any mechanism for a user to lose "awards karma" like there is for post and comment karma?

Regarding AutoModerator, will we be able to reference award karma in addition to post/comment karma? I could envision a rule that blocks likely spammers with high award karma but low post/comment karma.

Comment by reseph at 06/07/2020 at 18:31 UTC

7 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Wasn't there a progress bar showing off the daily gilds to reach a certain goal for Reddit? I don't see that anymore on the global side.

Comment by Watchful1 at 06/07/2020 at 18:42 UTC

9 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Any chance you could expand on "early"? Is it a threshold or just goes down over time?

What happens with awards given from a subreddit's coin bank? My sub still has leftover coins from best of 2019. Would me giving them out grant my account award karma?

Also obligatory, is reward karma count available in the API?

Comment by LazyOldPervert at 06/07/2020 at 19:57 UTC

7 upvotes, 0 direct replies

I think sooner or later this is going to back fire since in someway if you're using this to elevate or highlight content based on awards that can be bought your system will be manipulated.

further I think this is going to alienate a lot of the older user base since all the award money just goes to reddit and doesn't actually do anything for the user except give them a fancy icon. Seems pretty transparent and vapid to me but what do I know.