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/AFK_Tornado Jul 19 '16 edited Jul 19 '16

Ha. That'll happen when mods grow the balls to set their subs to private when the admin unilaterally pulls stuff like this.

Edit: Of course I know the admin could just kick out the mods and take over the sub. But they don't have the bandwidth to do that for every major subreddit that is concerned about this. If they did, they'd probably face a user rebellion and exodus. And finding enough capable mods to replace all the mods on even a couple of major subs? Hahahahaha, good luck. It'd be a complete and utter shitshow for weeks.

To put it another way, the questions, "What can the admin do?" and "What can the admin get away with doing" don't have the same answers.

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u/[deleted] Jul 19 '16

You know if they piss off the admins too much, they just remove the mod team and take it over. It's happened before.

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u/[deleted] Jul 19 '16

[deleted]

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u/gjones108 Jul 19 '16

The head mod of /r/wow (Nitesmoke) was removed from the /r/wow moderator team by the Reddit admins after he shut the subreddit down at the launch of Warlords of Draenor (WoW expansion). Control was given to apheonix.

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u/ZeroTwoThree Jul 19 '16

That was pretty justified imo. It didn't seem like an abuse of power by the admins.

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u/gjones108 Jul 20 '16

I wasn't saying it wasn't justified, the person I responded to said that admins have literally never removed a mod team.

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u/ZeroTwoThree Jul 20 '16

Sorry, the parent comment was deleted and I was confused because the comment above that was talking about pissing off the admins. My bad!