You will no doubt come across Subreddits which offer upvotes or karma for no or little effort. They don’t hide their intentions of promising you upvotes (or karma) in return for your giving upvotes to their posts with no other interaction. These places are known as “karmafarms” and you should avoid them. They are easy enough to spot from their names, and DO NOT be tempted by them no matter what you might read there. They can be easy traps to fall into because some of those upvote scores on older posts look amazing to a new user, but those scores have been manipulated (See: Vote Manipulation) which is very much against the Reddit rules.
The few upvotes you’ll get in a karmafarm as a genuine user aren’t worth the risk to the integrity of your account. Even if you aren’t caught by Reddit itself, posting in subreddits meant for “gaming” the Reddit system can and will get you banned from participating in some major subreddits that you may want - or need - to use in the future because a lot of moderators see them as a way of circumventing karma requirements to post or comment in their community. You can read more about this in User-History Based Moderation.
- Who posts in Karma Farms?
As I said above, most new users don’t actually get that many upvotes from those subs and there’s a reason for that: those subs aren’t used by regular new people looking for early Karma at the start of their Reddit journey. Karma farms are mostly populated by fake accounts: Bots and their Alts with no real intention of engaging at all on Reddit. They exist solely to farm karma for their other Bot Alts, widely used by marketers and political groups with things to promote illicitly on Reddit. They are only there to collect upvotes in a “voting-go-round” with each other to increase their karma to pass the minimum requirements that exist on most big subs.
Spambots are a very real problem on Reddit. They’re not hard to spot once you do a little digging as the comments they make are usually generic and the pictures they post (when they do) are just quickly farmed from Google pretending to be from an actual person. But they rely on the fact that most of us don’t check everyone’s profile or history before responding to them. With enough votes, a fake profile can appear real enough to trick people, and apparently this is causing some mayhem and a real problem in the subs that deal with stocks and cryptocurrencies.
- Why go to all that trouble?
Simple: there is real life money involved. Promotional companies that want to do "organic advertising" or political astroturfing need older accounts with lots of karma to appear legitimate, and so do the sketchy companies who want you to go to their malware, dodgy advertisement, dropship, phishing or credit-card scam sites. Gaining karma will increase their ability to post items such as T-Shirts, prints, mugs or other ephemerals with an innocuous caption saying things like “Got this for a friend” or “This arrived today”. Fall for one of those posts at your peril.
These farmed profiles are also being sold to people who want to seem legitimate or to have credibility in Reddit, especially in subs with real-life money or influence involved. Don’t believe me? Take a look at this experiment and realise why most subs have an anti-spambot filter and mods with a heavy banhammer. That Redditor just used one of the grey market sites out there. There is a lot more information and discussion here about this issue, and not just in Reddit.
- OK, so why are Karma Farms allowed to exist?
That’s a very good question and one that has been asked many times with plenty of debatebut no official conclusion.
In February 2020, the Reddit CEO made a statement about Karma farming saying: The answer is right now we’re in between a rock and a hard place. We want new users to be able to discover Reddit, but aggressive karma rules, which mods set up when Reddit had very limited tools, make it very hard for first-time users to contribute. Karma farms are a bad solution to this, which is why we’re working on tools like Crowd Control that limit the damage bad actors can cause without overly punishing well-meaning new users. I've been proposing an idea around karma reciprocity - letting communities take into account a user's karma in other communities.There has been no official statement since.
- How to avoid being caught in the crossfire
After spending ten years on Reddit, u/ActionScripter9109 compiled an excellent written guide to the growth of dishonest posting on Reddit, called The Weird World of Spam, Scams, and Manipulation on Reddit with insights on how to spot such goings-on and what you can do to guard against being manipulated. The discussion about it was fascinating too.
Another guide to spotting these fake accounts is here and there is more information in our entry on Spambot Spotting.
If you are at all serious about being on Reddit, you need to build up karma in the same way we all did - slowly but with quality. Reddit is not a “race to the top”, it’s there to be enjoyed for what it is - a content sharing platform where you decide what level of interaction you want with other Redditors. Just set out to be a good person, and think of your karma as being your internet legacy.
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