The most important, yet meaningless, thing has happened on reddit today. After eight years, users can finally get karma on text-posts. For years, users who’ve published just text on reddit were unable to get karma, which displays how many upvotes you get on your user page. It’s essentially worthless, a number used solely for bragging rights or to get some reward for spending all your time complaining on the internet.
According to the official announcement by reddit admin powerlanguage : “from this day forward we will now be giving users karma for text-posts. This will be combined with link karma and presented as ‘post karma’ on userpages.”
In reddit’s infancy, you could only post links to other sites. Sneaky users managed to trick the system in order to have a blank comment page that didn’t link to anything. Once reddit as a whole realized they could do this, they went crazy and the site was overrun with self-posts. Reddit realized this, and made self-posting an option on reddit, even though you couldn’t put any actual dialogue into these pages until much later.
Are you excited to finally be able to get karma for your posts, or does it really mean nothing? Tell us in the comments!
