Confessions of a Reddit 'Karma Whore': My years-long journey to the top of Reddit's karma leaderboards has only made me feel more alone

I know I'm a bit cynical about these things, but I can't help feeling like this article is just another form of attention-seeking by Mr Burlage, aka /u/dickfromaccounting. There's no point to the article. He's not really celebrating his karma achievements (he tries to downplay them at the same time as drawing attention to them). He's not warning about the pitfalls of being a karma whore. He's not explaining how Reddit works. He has just found a different way for "the work of my amused fingers [to] hold the attention of a sliver of the world".

"As the days slog on, I can see that most of the rocks are turned over. There are very few corners left for me to check."... so he found a different rock to turn over and another corner of the internet to check. I feel like he's just leveraging his Reddit fame to bring himself wider recognition and more attention on a different platform.

I'll stress that the scale here is smaller than the article, but as a sad teen circa 2008 I had some degree of "local internet fame". It's embarrassing to talk about, but I intentionally cultivated notoriety through similar means to the essay author. I got to know the cliques through observation and I decided who I wanted to "get in" with. I matched their posting styles and times. I'd write down notes and jokes to use later and keep track of which ones were successful and which ones weren't. I spent hours and hours on this.

It was absolutely unhealthy but damn if it wasn't a great palliative for "IRL" (for lack of a better term) loneliness and poor self-esteem. If I was feeling low I could just go back and look at my mentions and stats, or post something and get that instant validation. Even getting worked up emotionally over dumb internet drama felt good in its own way. Made me feel important.

I did eventually snap out of it, and I look back on my time with the same kind of cringing nostalgia that I reserve for most of high school. I got therapy, my activity petered off as I developed my offline life and I started taking an entirely more relaxed approach to internet socialization. I can't imagine going back.

So... I don't know. I guess I feel bad for him; not because I'm necessarily taking this essay at face value, but more because he felt moved to publish it at all and he equates high karma with "fame" or "stardom". It's definitely some projection, but I know that the times I highly valued things like likes/reblogs/points were times in my life that were otherwise very low, where I was seeking out ways to get attention and validation that I wasn't getting elsewhere. It's social junk food.

I've always been fascinated by karmawhores and what motivates them so I feel a little disappointed by the lack of introspection in this article. It's like he wrote half of it for readers who have no idea what reddit is, then with the remaining half, he just babbled on without really talking about why he does this, or even give an idea to how much time he dedicates to finding stuff to post. The whole thing, like everything he posts on reddit, was just empty and meaningless.

I remember in the beginning of 2018 I got curious about karma whores and decided to look up a submitter's post history if they had a viral post or shared a frequently reposted image or gif. Most of these users, like dickfromaccounting, were posting dozens of times a day; all of it being the same kind of broad, half-amusing images or gifs that dominates most of reddit today. In order to keep track of these people, I started tagging them in RES with something like "power user" or "karmawhore." I knew that there were power users at the time, but I was shocked to see how much of the content on front page of /r/all was submitted by this small group of people. On average, about half of the top 25 posts on /r/all would come from powerusers. I'm not sure how much of that has changed in the last year since I barely visit the site these days, but I expect it to be the same, if not worse. Which brings me back to my disappointment with this article. Why are these people doing this? Is it just about finding a sense of purpose and belonging when you're a bored, aimless 20-something? Or is there a feeling of power with knowing that they can reach millions of people? Do they talk to each other? Is there a financial motivation to this? Are advertisers behind some of these accounts? And what does reddit the company think about this? I find it alarming that only a couple of accounts can dominate the top-25 day in and day out. Even if it's just silly little gifs and pictures, there is still an opportunity to manipulate people with the language in the title, or use these comments to host a fake conversation.

I remember back when I first joined reddit. The saying going around back then was "karma doesn't mean shit, so don't worry about it".

What a long, strange trip it's been since then.

Does anyone else think that Reddit is starting to turn into the next Digg?

I remember the hysteria and almost celebrity-like cult surrounding power users like MrBabyMan back in the Digg days. That guy was actually one of the better users that the Digg community propped up themselves. Others gamed their way to the top by manipulating the system and astroturfing on a site-wide scale. It's a massive problem because if you submitted any link to Digg, it would get no votes at all, and actually risked getting buried by the blog spammers that littered the site. The only worthwhile interaction that most users would have on Digg was honestly in the comments section. Then came Reddit, which got past the problem in two ways, first by having a better algorithm and second by having individual subreddits that were run by the community.

But now Reddit is starting to turn the same way. I am within the top 10,000 users on Reddit by karma accumulated and even I have little to no influence on what actually goes on the site. It is actually the top dozen or so who control this. Reddit's most prolific users gamed their way to the top but unlike with Digg they gained spectacular influence across the entire site to the point of being able to control everything that gets posted to the site as moderators. From my experiences, power mods like Gallowboob and iBleeedOrange moderate their subs like power tripping jerks, banning people they simply don't like or disagree with and responding to any appeal by rudely hitting the mute button. Worst of all, the admins simply don't give a damn about their behaviour, even though Reddit ironically has moderator guidelines and a form for submitting complaints against moderators to the site's staff.

I feel like Reddit is one huge misstep away from losing its user base. I don't know whether the redesign will be the straw that breaks the camel's back, or the inevitable ban of another popular subreddit like r/the_donald. One thing's for certain, Redditors are starting to have enough.