…and do you think that you posting it has a positive, neutral or negative effect on the world?
By content I mean what ever you’re posting online. The pictures you post on Instagram/Pixelfed or messages you’re writing on Lemmy, YouTube comment section, Facebook and so on.
If you look back at what you have posted in the past year for example, do you consider it to be the kind of content that you would gladly consume if it was coming from someone else? If not, then why are you posting it in the first place?
Karma matters early on posting on reddit cuz many subreddits blocked negative karma posters via automod. Later it became more granular with subreddit specific karma. After several years there I had 6 digit karma spread across all my regular haunts which granted me a degree of freedom to get downvoted wherever cuz I had stockpiles to dip into.
On lemmy that doesn’t apply.
The first thing you learn when you start using Reddit is that karma matters. Lots of communities have a minimum. There are communities dedicated to building karma. There are secret clubs for high karma earners.
It is the great unspoken secret that everyone knows.
To an extent, but not really that great of one. Once you’re past like… a hundred, you’re fine basically everywhere of note.
Basically every community of note that I modded did. Kept out a lot of shitters. Sure some regular folks might’ve gotten hit in the crossfire but omelettes, eggs, and nothing better from the admin side to stop the previously mentioned shitters.
We’d ban people who used those ngl, cuz guess who else used those subs?
They aren’t as interesting as you might think. Source: Was in several. Lot of similar names shooting the shit. Secret mod subs were like that too tbh.
All true.
Why don’t communities on Lemmy require “karma” minimums? Because admins remove bots and trolls. If reddit were not a completely toxic site, they could have done so as well.
Reddit uses karma as an underlying status symbol and reinforces it because it is driven by profit and “engagement.” It’s the same with likes on Meta platforms, subscribers/followers on other platforms… the gamification of social interaction. It’s one part of social media that causes the kinds of harms we’ve been talking about here.