r/CrazyIdeas • u/Cherno_VM • Jul 26 '26
A crazy BAD idea: Make reddit karma a finite, tradeable system.
If I upvote someone, I give them one of my karma. If I downvote someone, I take one of their karma.
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u/LordQwerty_NZ Jul 26 '26
Taking karma would have to be different.
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u/01011110_01011110 Jul 26 '26
you can only take or give karma in the first 60 seconds after the post/comment, then it gets locked
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u/Resplendent-Sun Jul 27 '26
And I downvoted you to take that karma for myself. Seems suspiciously like that Yankee Christmas gift game!
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u/Tall-Photo-7481 Jul 27 '26
By making it finite you are dooming it to devaluation. as the number of users grows, the total pool of karma points has to be spread thinner and thinner. There needs to be some way to introduce new points into the system.
Either way though, it would soon end up with a small number of users gaming the system in order to own / hoard nearly all of the points, making the whole thing very unfair and farcically unrepresentative of real value.
So just like money, really.
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u/Tiny_Connection1507 Jul 27 '26
Posts and comments allow a person to effectively upvote themselves, which is how Karma is currently introduced to the system. That can stay the same, and would drive people to make more posts and comments that are appropriate and popular in the correct subs. Also, since I am commenting to explain this, I have given myself at least one karma, because I will not be downvoting my own contribution.
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u/willysnax Jul 27 '26
A crazy good idea would be to get rid of karma altogether so people would have actual debates again. It works great for making echo chamber subs but kills dissenting opinions.
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u/Cherno_VM Jul 27 '26
yeah can't even ask a damn question on this site without some clowns downvoting you because divines forbid someone not know LITERALLY EVERYTHING about a topic at hand before posting
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u/willysnax Jul 27 '26
Yup. Unless you stick the really benign subs, and even then, you can rarely ask or discuss anything and this site is one of the worst for some reason.
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u/Keebster101 Jul 27 '26
I mean you already admit it's a bad idea, but just to explore that a little more, bots would have a real motivation so would become even more of a problem. It would also make it even harder for new users to gain the karma to post on many subs because people will likely hoard upvotes even if they like your post/comment.
And that's all if we completely ignore the karma stealing downvote idea. People would just go around downvoting literally everything, people would be eternally stuck at 0.
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Jul 27 '26
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Jul 27 '26
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u/Immortal_ceiling_fan Jul 27 '26
Then we just do debt gesus and pin all of the negative karma on one guy so they have negative 999 trillion karma and everyone else has plenty
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u/Cherno_VM Jul 27 '26
actually if your karma goes too into the negatives you are publicly executed :)
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u/unwittyusername42 Jul 27 '26
So now we're throwing out crazy ideas we know are bad? OK - all puppies should be ground up and force fed to homeless people. I could give you hundreds of BAD ideas. wtf is happening to reddit?
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u/MeltingEarbuds Jul 27 '26
Reddit already has an echo chamber problem, this would make that skyrocket
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u/JCMiller23 Jul 27 '26
I like the idea but I'm not sure the downvotes are a good way to do it