It lets the community defend itself against spammers and other undesirables, and provides a low-cost/low-effort feedback mechanism. Other sites use reputation systems too—they have real benefits in terms of creating responsible behaviour.
I find it quite useful—if I don’t have much time to read the rest posts, or comments to an interesting post, I’ll only read those with high karma, so I appreciate the time-saving mechanism. It also creates an incentive for high-quality comments, which I appreciate too.
The karma system is a psychological trick to gain more engagement with the website from certain kinds of foolish people. Just ignore it.
It lets the community defend itself against spammers and other undesirables, and provides a low-cost/low-effort feedback mechanism. Other sites use reputation systems too—they have real benefits in terms of creating responsible behaviour.
I find it quite useful—if I don’t have much time to read the rest posts, or comments to an interesting post, I’ll only read those with high karma, so I appreciate the time-saving mechanism. It also creates an incentive for high-quality comments, which I appreciate too.