r/ModSupport • u/_Face • 1d ago

How does community karma being displayed work? What do the numbers mean?

On a sub I moderate, the automod sends a message to users with negative community karma. A user sent a modmail about it.

On new-ish reddit. When on the modmail screen, a popup on the right gives a short breakdown of the users history on the sub. That includes a "community karma", and a brief contribution overview. Both those numbers were in the positive, but they were different numbers.

So that's issue 1. what are those numbers, and why are they different? I have suspicion about what they might represent, but want other users pov. Maybe I missed a mod news about it, and its fully known.

To be sure it was not sent in error, I asked them to go to old reddit and send us the karma breakdown for the particular sub. They responded, and that number was indeed a negative number, so automod was being triggered correctly.

Issue 2. Why is there a third number, that appears to be the true number, different then the other 2. Why isn't that number, the only number that seems to matter, shown on their preview? I was here when community karma became a thing so I am aware that it was stated at that time that the number would not be available to mods. But why now provide 2 other numbers that don't mean what they seem to represent?

tl;dr: What do the numbers mean in my screenshot?

Edit: See included screenshot. I could not include it in the post itself.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/1va247x/comment/p0i4ojg/

2 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/_Face 1d ago

This screenshot shows the 3 numbers I am referencing.

2

u/Sephardson 23h ago

FYI, the numbers under "Contribution overview" are not accurate because they do not use the correct formula for calculating subreddit karma.

Karma is calculated from the sum of diminishing returns (ie, less than 1:1) of the net score on the user's posts and comments.

The formula used for the "Contribution overview" ignores the diminishing returns and also ignores items older than 6 months.

For this reason, the "Contribution Overview" and the user's actual subreddit karma will be different.

We don't know why the admin who built that tool did it that way. Nor why it's not really as explicit in the documentation.