this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Back in the Elder Days, I had a four digit user id on slashdot. Slashdot was the first social media site that I had seen that implemented a karma system. At some point within the first few years (iirc), they capped karma at +5 per post.
I decided to try an experiment where I’d see how much karma farming I could do, and simply started making pro-Linux and anti-Microsoft posts multiple times a day. As someone exclusively using Linux (this was probably around 1996-1997) and who hated MS, this wasn’t a big stretch. I got a massive amount of karma in a very short time with intentionally fluff posts, which forever changed how I’d look at social media.
Now the posts I enjoy writing are mostly long form ones, of which I actually hit post on less than half. I easily get pages into a post before deciding I just don’t care about it all that much and just don’t bother submitting it.
There’s several things social media sites could do in order to cut down on fluff and encourage more engaging posts, but it means walking away from the easy karma models.
I do the exact same thing - writing a wall of text, just to close the window and never submit it!
Fully agree with this. And Slashdot itself did a few things right in this direction, like the +5 karma/post limit that you mentioned or acknowledging that people upvote things for different reasons (funny, insightful, etc.). It's just that certain businesses like Reddit don't really care about quality of the experience of its users - they care about ad views per second.