This is the money quote for me:<p>"I shut myself up in my room. The further I removed myself from the people I knew in the real world, the further I descended into the minds of people I’ve never interacted with and would never meet again."<p>It seems the author isn't even aware of how awful this is, since later he admits he's still a karma whore. I am thankful that I recognized what an abysmal facsimile of an actual life this sort of thing is when it was only Usenet. I had a similar addiction for a little less than a year in the mid-90s. It seriously damaged my marriage, and more than I realized at the time, in hindsight.<p>Real relationships with actual, real people that you can see and touch and talk to are essential for a healthy life. If this statement causes a negative reaction, please ask yourself why. It needs your immediate attention.
Binary social feedback systems often run into the same issues - people game the system and people use downvotes to disagree. There's no nuance in positive sentiments either - people conflate upvotes with reputation.<p>It makes me feel like early experiments with multi-variate moderation deserve a second look. I know that simpler systems generally increase engagement, that's probably why everyone (even Netflix) converged to a simple up / down model. But there might be simple ways to split out the types of feedback we're always worried about conflating. You could add little emoji or stickers below each post that are default grayed out, as an option instead of replying.<p>One of them could be a "this makes me angry because I disagree"-sad-thunderstorm sticker. Another could be spam. That approach would funnel downvotes into separately bins for spam, low effort, and controversial. That sorting could nudge the crowd into providing much more useful feedback. People wouldn't have to ask why they were downvoted.<p>Gaming would probably happen, but it'd be more diffuse. If there are multiple positive bins, not everyone is going to be gaming in the same way, they won't be comparable.<p>Allowing this to be customizable on each subreddit could allow for some really crazy experiments. The unpopular opinion reddit could create a user interface that actually encourages the sort of voting they want, as opposed to constantly complaining that people are voting incorrectly.
That was an excellent piece. I've done a similar thing on a much smaller scale (fighting for karma within niche subreddits), complete with the careful analysis of which content sources do best, which times of day are ideal, what kind of titles and themes cater most to the userbase... I ended up writing plenty of automation as well, to help me filter through the vast quantity of potential submissions and find those which would guarantee a top spot.<p>Reddit is a nice confluence of several things that humans find addicting - semi-random rewards, detailed metrics, quick feedback, novel stimuli, all magnifying the power of underlying signal (social approval). None of that is <i>specific</i> to reddit, of course–every social website eventually becomes that same game, or dies.<p>Unlike the OP, though, I didn't find it unhealthy. Compared to, say, video games, or TV, chasing karma was a much better hamster wheel to run on; it motivated the sort of careful analysis, planning, and diligence that I could eventually apply to real problems. My hope is that reddit (and reddit-like attention machines) push more strongly in this direction; the ideal feedback loop isn't one that spurs no addiction at all, but rather one for which addiction has net positive consequences.
> I began my Reddit career on some of the site's true crime communities<p>What is fascinating that there are exactly zero advantage of having large karma racked up on reddit (or HN). Most likely this would in fact work against you. However, still, brain is wired up the maximize <i>any</i> social recognition it sees regardless of its usefulness or "realness". This is in same class as a drug addition where brain can't prevent itself from doing things even when it understands its not good for the being.
The post mentions u/poem_for_your_prog, a truly talented writer and poet. Definitely one of my favorite Reddit personalities. Check out their Reddit profile here: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Poem_for_your_sprog" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/user/Poem_for_your_sprog</a><p>Also worth taking a look at is u/Shitty_Watercolour: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Shitty_Watercolour" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/user/Shitty_Watercolour</a>
Man. It hasn't directly impacted other areas of my life, but I get a similar feeling from HN. Sometimes I have to log myself out to get out of the cycle.
A year or two ago I did something similar but much less methodical. I collected about 200 questions (a mix of stolen, modified, and original) and used a cron-job to post several of them every morning (US time) to AskReddit. I ended up with multiple successful posts. I seemed to get at least 2-3 with a score in the thousands every week.
I was a reddit troll. Or at least that's what they called me. It started when I got involved in a sub where I am a fairly well-known expert. I would correct people. Get blasted cause I wasn't nice or they thought my answer needed any number of corrections. Then it got to the point where the number of questions and comments were so out of the realm of reality I couldn't stand to read them.<p>Then I started questioning people and I came to a stark realization. 80% of the people in several technology threads were kids under 18 years old--typically 15--and had no work experience in the field!<p>But this is my point. Karma on reddit means less than nothing to anybody outside of reddit postings and, even then, it doesn't mean anything to 80% of all those people cause they won't look at or notice your karma anyway. So what's the point? What is the value in that?<p>Despite my troll reputation, and you may know me, I still have nearly 10K in karma value. What does that tell you?<p>When I'm in my social and family circles, I almost never hear anything about reddit and, when I do, it's always a joke about an insane posting where everyone laughs at how stupid it is.<p>I'll never forget the comment of a reporter on NPR one day who stated, "Reddit is a Frankenstein's monster even they can't control".
> If another post was competing with mine to trend within the subreddit, I’d downvote it, and others, in an attempt to trigger the algorithm that would give mine a boost.<p>I'd have thought that such behavior would be punished. As I understand it, HN goes further, looking for voting cabals and sock-puppet groups.
One of the niche subreddits I subscribe to had a post hit the front page a couple weeks ago, and ever since it's been constantly spammed with dumb jokey posts from one-day-old accounts. Reading this article makes me suspect I am seeing karma whores at work, hoping to come up with just the right dumb garbage to make this subreddit hit the front page again. It's so annoying.
This is the manner of thing I expect from Reddit. This is the most important paragraph, to me:<p>''The act of seeking karma is a sensitive issue on the site. Some users post original content, or stuff that they only make themselves. These users, Redditors will tell you, are respectable because their pursuit of karma is funded by their own work and energy. But the site’s system is volatile, and not all original content is well-received. Karma whores know this in their core. Karma whores learn to be clinical and bot-like. Karma whores make nothing themselves and often pull their content from users on other sites without crediting. This recklessness, Redditors will tell you, reveals the true emptiness dwelling inside these people.''<p>You see much of the same behaviour here. I've noticed this manner of website tends to avoid discussing the issues with upvotes and downvotes; they're only good in theory and are constantly abused in practice; discussions of gaming the system are also typically taboo. It's clear to any idiot that if you want Internet points on Hacker News, you simply spend time uploading the work of others and collecting the value ascribed to that which you had nothing to do with.<p>The only reason I made this account was to promote my work to a wider audience, only to find that no one on ''Hacker'' ''News'' was interested in the least. None of my work has received even a single comment. That's another issue with voting systems; people are led to believe a vote may as well be a comment, so they don't write one. Anyway, the utter disgust and disappointment I've experienced and also seen secondhand for some others I hold in good regard towards this place has led me to implement my own comment system, so as to be free from trying to appeal to this place.<p>I'd delete this account, being sick of this nonsense already, but it's my understanding the posts would remain indefinitely, so I'll keep this account to make posts such as this, giving my opinion on these things I find wrong here.
One of my favourite takeaways from this is that Reddit users are constantly poking fun at instagram and twitter for recycling reddit posts whereas in reality I estimate 75% of the content I see on the front page originated from one of those sites, posted by a "Karma Whore".
I did something very similar to this on Blind. I lurked on that app for months and the very first post I made blew up. The dopamine hit was such that the next few months were spent in getting as many Blind points as possible. Pretty sure that if there was a leaderboard, I was at the top of it for at least some time.<p>And then one fine day I realized that all the effort was pretty points. Just like Reddit karma, Blind points had no value. Deleted the app, deleted accounts on all social media (Facebook, Instagram, etc) and life has been pretty much good since then.
Disclaimer:<p>I don't think the reddit organization is responsible for this
I do think the guy needs help.<p>I think this is the WWI of our generation to realize how much computer technology can be a bad thing. We've had dark patterns influence behavior and the health of people. We've had strategies that are designed to hook unsuspecting people and we're seeing some serious repercussions out of it.<p>Not sure what to suggest to do here. But I do find it concerning.
Of course I'll get downvoted for this, but in any case: I expect the pejorative use of "whore" from 13 year olds in youtube comment sections, but less so from a front-page hacker news post.