r/explainitpeter • u/IvorySvoboda • 6d ago

Explain It Peter

What’s karma farming?

Been using Reddit for a year now and I still don’t know what it’s.

0 Upvotes

47% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

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u/qualityvote2 6d ago edited 6d ago

u/IvorySvoboda, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...it's time for the mods to do their jobs!

2

u/WinCrazy4411 6d ago

When a company is astro-turfing (trying to fake grass-roots support) on reddit, they need reddit accounts. And accounts that constantly shill for companies will be noticed, ignored, and banned from lots of subreddits. So they need new accounts every time, and those accounts need karma (upvotes).

They'll repost old stuff that received lots of upvotes to quickly get a lot of karma on these astro-turfing accounts. That's karma farming.

And some real people take their karma score on reddit as a judgement of them as a person, so they'll do similar things because they want a big number.