Reddit

The initial purpose of karma is to serve as user reputation and indicate that the person with tons of downvotes as trolls. It used to be a good system until spez realised the importance of engagement in social media, and then karma became a dopamine-inducing instrument to keep users on the site.

When I was on reddit, some users would tell me my karma or comment is only going down for going against the grain. I hit back that they are the losers for caring about imaginary points. I also hate that if you are logged into new reddit, it would notify you of new upvotes on your comment. I don't care! I'm not a kid anymore to revel on receiving participation trophies. The new reddit design is clearly for children who don't know any better and this is why I think reddit will last longer than we would wish it not to be. If I want a dopamine hit, I'd prefer being notified of new responses, or I would look at some of my upvoted comments if I am feeling that shallow.

There are some subreddits that REQUIRE a specific Karma level to post or comment. So I understand that and I think that is bullshit. Imagine posting something relevant on reddit but you get massively downvoted so you run like a little baby and delete it because you have to protect your karma total. Best thing about Lemmy is no karma bullshit. I have some posts or comments (that of course don't violate Lemmy rules) but that get lots of downvotes and I couldn't care less.

Sometimes I wanna tell people what I really think about them but it's not the karma/vote counts that stop me. It's usually the rules about being civil. But god damn some people are infuriating.

Considering you will often get permanently banned for saying the wrong thing in the wrong sub...I would say the problem goes far beyond simply counting Karma.

I turned off my inbox notifications amd my experience got dramatically better lol

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