On Reddit, users can cast votes, called upvotes and downvotes, on threads and comments posted by other users. The number of upvotes subtracted by the number of downvoted is displayed beside the post as the number of karma "points" the post has. On users' profile pages, you can also see the total karma of the user, which is the total number of upvotes they got on Reddit subtracted by the number of downvotes.
The same system exists on Imgur.
Fake Internet Points
Upvotes, downvotes, and karma mean nothing on Reddit and also everything on Reddit.
Everybody knows karma is just fake Internet points. You can't buy anything with karma. It's just a number. You don't gain anything. It doesn't unlock any features. If you have 1 million karma, that just means you spend too much time on Reddit. For most people, karma means nothing at all, and upvotes don't matter.
Minimum Karma
There are some subreddits that won't allow you to post if you don't have a minimum amount of karma. The threads and comments you post will be automatically removed by the AutoModerator. The reason for this is to prevent new accounts from posting, in order to prevent bots and trolls who try to evade bans from posting.
On Reddit, moderators are just random users. They aren't getting paid to moderate spam.
The amount of karma you need to post varies from subreddit to subreddit, but it's often very low. You just need to post a couple of random memes on some popular subreddits, and within a day you'll have enough karma. They may also have restrictions on how old your account needs to be before posting, though.
Visibility
Upvotes mean visibility.
By default, the front page of a subreddit is sorted by "best." Similarly, the home feed of users is also sorted by "best." This "best" sorting considers freshness and popularity, i.e. more recent posts with more upvotes appear first.
This means that if a post doesn't have enough upvotes, it won't appear on the front page of the subreddit, and it won't appear on the subreddit's members home feeds, because there will be other posts with more upvotes or more recency that will have priority.
Similarly, inside a thread, the comments that appear first by default are the best comments.
Bots: Gaming the System
When you post a thread, your thread is only visible to users who browse by "new." Most people do not browse by "new," they browse by "best" or "hot." In order for your post to appear on "best" or "hot," it needs to get enough upvotes from people who browse by "new."
And that's kind of where the whole thing falls apart.
The people who browse by "best" aren't getting the posts that people who browse by "best" consider to be the best posts. They're only seeing the posts that people who browse by "new" let pass. If "new" downvotes a post, it never reaches "best," no matter how many votes it would have gotten there.
The best comments in a thread were upvoted by people who were in the thread before you. If there are 100 comments, and you only look at the best 10, and you cast your votes only to the comments that you see, that means the more upvotes something has the more upvotes something will get because it has gotten more visibility.
It's a snowball effect. A snowball effect that can easily be gamed by bots and malicious actors. While I assume Reddit's staff tries to fight that, it's really not something you can just prevent. Every social media has a large amount of bots trying to game the system. On Reddit, it's just far more obvious, because of the upvotes.
With a small number of bots to automatically curate what is allowed to get out of "new" and into "best," you effectively gain control of what most users will see.
While I'm not sure if this is something that actually happens or not, it's important to keep this in mind: it's possible that all the posts you see in a subreddit, or even in all of Reddit, are only there because bots allowed them to pass, and you'll never find the posts that the bots downvoted before anyone else could see them to upvote them.
Negative Karma
If a comment gets downvoted enough, its karma becomes negative. Comments with negative karma are hidden by default. It's also called "downvoted to oblivion."
Redditors are easily swayed by karma. If your comment has positive karma, people will assume you know what you're talking about. If you have negative karma, people will assume you're the worst person to ever live on Earth.
This is important because Redditors will feel "empowered" to argue with users who have been downvoted. It's kind of cowardly, honestly. They only engage with downvoted comments because they feel other Redditors are on their side. It really doesn't matter what the comment says. If it's downvoted, they will start "dunking" on it like bullies.
Reddit lets users browse by "controversial" to find downvoted posts easily. Honestly, I think they should just remove this feature.
If you ever get a downvoted comment on Reddit, the best thing to do is to disable reply notifications, so that if someone replies to your downvoted comment, you never learn about it. You might think the other person is misinterpreting what you said and you can explain it better to them, but that's not how it works. They aren't engaging in good faith. You could say "2 + 2 = 4" and they would still assume you're wrong.
Just leave Reddit, go touch grass, come back another day when you don't care anymore. Delete your comment if you want. It doesn't really matter. It's just fake Internet points.
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