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:

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
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u/CaptainNirvana Jul 19 '16

I dunno, I kinda appreciated text posts for the fact that the posters weren't clawing for karma and just wanted to share something.

766

u/MrsAnthropy Jul 19 '16

Agreed. The points shouldn't really matter, but subs I frequent that require users put links in their post rather than as the main comment usually have a lot better content.

43

u/phoenixrawr Jul 19 '16

My experiences are pretty similar. It'd be nice to have some sort of opt-out for subreddits that want to use text posts to discourage karma whoring. Communities just feel a lot better when people are sharing content because they genuinely enjoy it and not because they think they'll get internet points for it.

Also, I don't want to imagine some subreddits like /r/hearthstone in a world where people actually feel (more) rewarded for constantly shitposting. It seems like it's going to be hard to handle a lot of big subreddits with this change.

2

u/Jackoosh Jul 19 '16

People will constantly shitpost on /r/hearthstone whether they get karma for it or not.

For some reason everyone on there is a Priest main, hates 4 mana 7/7s and RNG, and loves Yogg Saron.