[2021] Reddit karma threshold is annoying and a bad idea

Reddit accounts have positive karma upon creation, and posts which are both heavily upvoted and also heavily downvoted increase your karma overall due to a cap on the number of downvotes that can impact your karma. To offer an example of this, the most heavily downvoted Reddit comment of all time was this one by EACommunityTeam, which received 668,000 more downvotes than it did upvotes. Clicking on the link to their profile will show a handful of comments with hundreds or dozens of net upvotes, and about as many with several hundred thousand net downvotes. Their comment karma is positive and a five-digit number.

There was a time when bots advertising knock-off merchandise such as t-shirts were taking up a considerable amount of our time, and also making r/LastEpoch look unmoderated - nobody likes going to a subreddit and seeing spam from bots on the front page. The introduction of a modest karma requirement to post in our subreddit resolved that problem overnight - most bots have in the range of +5 - -5 karma, and so their spam is removed without ever being seen.

I am genuinely sorry that this filter is impacting you, however I have to respectfully disagree with your claim that it is a bad idea. The metric relied upon by the filter is biased in your favour. The subreddit has nearly 10,000 Redditors subscribed to it, receives comments and votes from people that aren’t included in that number, and I believe this is the first time a user with negative karma has contacted us regarding it. The filter does a tremendous amount of good.

Every Redditor occasionally has comments downvoted, and I can appreciate that this happening several times right at the start may taint one’s impression of the system as a whole. That said, I do think you may have been overly quick to judge it. Just spending some time in subreddits relevant to your interests and being respectful when posting will result in the majority of your posts being well-received. This is how the system works and won’t take long at all.

What you suggest is outside of what we can achieve on Reddit; we cannot perform any real programming there - all we can do is configure tools made available to us by Reddit.

Respectfully, I’m still not quite sure you get just how low a proportion of legitimate users would be impacted by this, or just how quickly the problem would go away. Submitting a single on-topic link to a subreddit you’re interested in could you get you 100 karma in the blink of an eye.

Sure; there’s an unfathomably large number of subreddits.

Many don’t have such a filter in place, but some do.

That depends on how it is configured. For r/LastEpoch, it’s all or nothing.

On my personal account within the last seven days, I have;

• Asked a question because I didn’t know the answer.
• Linked another Redditor to a similar thread they were interested in.
• Offered neutral commentary regarding an article that had been shared.

The net votes each time was several dozen upvotes. You don’t have to “grind” karma, as you put it. I get the impression you’ve had a single negative experience based on writing critical comments of a game in a subreddit predominantly visited by its fans, and you’re basing your entire impression of the website on that one experience. I understand why your impression would therefore be negative, but I don’t think you’ve really given it much of a chance.

No; on Reddit an account has post karma and comment karma.

Some subreddits (individual communities) use filters based on these, and others don’t.

If you’re familiar with Path of Exile, I expect we’ll end up charting the same course GGG did. When you look at r/PathOfExile’s sidebar you see both the current moderators as well as the person that had created the subreddit originally back in 2011.

A former member of EHG staff created r/LastEpoch in June 2017. For context, our Kickstarter campaign began in April 2018, and people only began working on Last Epoch full-time after it had concluded. The community was a small fraction of what it is today back then, just as the community after 1.0 will be an order of magnitude larger than what it is today.

A relatively small subset of Redditors have the time, inclination, and temperment for moderation and typically there’s an interest in having a subreddit for quite a long time before there’s enough trustworthy people with the amount of time required to moderate it effectively.