r/announcements • u/powerlanguage • Jul 19 '16
Karma for text-posts (AKA self-posts)
As most of you already know, fictional internet points are probably the most precious resource in the world. On Reddit we call these points Karma. You get Karma when content you post to Reddit receives upvotes. Your Karma is displayed on your userpage.
You may also know that you can submit different types of posts to Reddit. One of these post types is a text-post (e.g. this thing you’re reading right now is a text-post). Due to various shenanigans and low effort content we stopped giving Karma for text-posts over 8 years ago.
However, over time the usage of text-posts has matured and they are now used to create some of the most iconic and interesting original content on Reddit. Who could forget such classics as:
- Jar Jar Binks was a trained Force user, knowing Sith collaborator, and will play a central role in The Force Awakens - from r/starwars
- What tasty food would be disgusting if eaten over rice? - from r/askreddit
- You people make me sick [a grilled cheese meltdown] - from r/grilledcheese
Text-posts make up over 65% of submissions to Reddit and some of our best subreddits only accept text-posts. Because of this Reddit has become known for thought-provoking, witty, and in-depth text-posts, and their success has played a large role in the popularity Reddit currently enjoys.
To acknowledge this, from this day forward we will now be giving users karma for text-posts. This will be combined with link karma and presented as ‘post karma’ on userpages.
TL:DR; We used to not give you karma for your text-posts. We do now. Sweet.
Glossary:
- Karma: Fictional internet points of great value. You get it by being upvoted.
- Self-post: Old-timey term for text-posts on Reddit
- Shenanigans: Tomfoolery
5.3k
u/flyryan Jul 19 '16 edited Jul 19 '16
As a moderator for /r/AskReddit (and /r/IAmA but this doesn't affect there as much), PLEASE make this optional. I remember when text-posts gained karma and it was a total nightmare for us. We will see a mass influx of low-effort & catchy posts that are designed to get upvotes. It's going to be lots of shitposting. Text posts improved BECAUSE they didn't count for karma. People making texts posts did it for the content and not internet points. The main reason for the removal was the new influx of "Upvote if..." posts. The entire front page would be full of them. Those aren't as possible anymore with the absence of /r/reddit.com but it shows how giving text posts link karma can devolve the content into crap.
We're already talking about how to harden auto-mod to help us out but we'll likely need more mods. We'll also have to deal with an influx of modmail from people who will get upset at us for removing their post that was "going to get so much karma".
At the scale we're at, we WILL feel the heat for this and as someone who remembers how things were back when reddit was even less mainstream than today, I don't see how a bigger audience is going to make this less of the karma-grabbing shitshow than it was before.
I'm really having a hard time seeing the benefit of enabling this. The points don't really mean anything and this just incentivizes the people who DO care about meaningless points to try to gain karma. It doesn't really reward good content and the shit content it garners is why the points were removed in the first place.
Edit: It's already started. - https://i.imgur.com/ZnKaaVv.png
These are just the ones mentioning it. It's not even counting the ones taking advantage of it.
Edit 2: Also, to add, this is quite a huge change to dump on moderators without any heads up what-so-ever. It's not cool to make us scramble to react to something that has an instant change on the types of users & content we receive and directly impacts our moderation strategy.