It is definitely difficult to gauge a stranger’s tone. Not sure what it is exactly about the way I write, but people often suspect I’m trolling when I’m being genuine.

As for the karma, I suspect that the total on the desktop site will be going away soon. It used to exist in the apps I use, but one day comment and post karma disappeared from Voyager, and recently Avelon dropped their summed total karma altogether. At first I resisted losing the counts, but after asking around, I learned that showing the totals is being actively discouraged to devs of the various apps because it’s thought to lead to unhealthy user behaviors. The more I thought about it, the more I agreed I’m guilty of a lot of those behaviors as a result of my 15 years on Reddit, so I’ve since tried to embrace its absence.