this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
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Asklemmy
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On top of that, bullshit "reputation" rules should never exist here.
When I first made my reddit account years ago, I remember being so confused when I couldn't post more than one comment every 10 minutes (absolute bullshit arbitrary restriction), and when I tried to join a community with "too low karma." "Oops, you can't do that cause you're an unpopular nobody and we don't want you here... Yet."
What's the actual point of holding someone back from joining your online community if they don't have enough "points" on their comments or posts? It's just such bullshit imo, and restricts everything an online forum should be.
Well it’s obviously to deter bots
It deters humans far more than bots.
Humans feel unwelcome and are much less likely to stick around.
It is a legitimate anti-abuse tactic. Like you've mentioned, there are obvious flaws, but it does help prevent brigadiers, advertisers and other bad actors from easily spinning up throwaways to harass or manipulate a community.
It's a ~~legitimate~~ CONFUSING anti-abuse tactic.
How is a normal person, who's never used reddit in the past, supposed to even know how to get karma? Or how the lack of karma is impacting their UX?
The only way is to game the system, get into a sub that allows shitposts and exists for the sole reason of boosting karma. Which immediately teaches the new person to game the system. Counter-intuitive and counter-productive.
I think it's definitely an effective way to keep new users from spamming.
It chases away new users (or, at the very least, keeps them from active participation). Because of this system, a new Reddit user is more likely to be a doom-scroller with zero participation. And that's what Reddit wants. Reddit doesn't need another shitposter. Reddit doesn't lack for quality content, since it aggregates the bulk of its content from other sites via powerusers. So fuck it if new people participate, as long as they see the advertising sponsors, Reddit is happy.
A well-run community will either be explicit about its age/karma requirement, or it will manually approve filtered posts from low-reputation accounts. I moderate /r/flashlight and we use the latter approach.
That takes work though. Some moderators are lazy, and some communities are understaffed. That's not good, but it most cases it's not malicious. It has fairly little to do with Reddit the company making money from advertisers.
I get that it works, but the side effects are sometimes worse than the disease.
There are better methods.
Agreed