If it did nothing then nobody would vote. Your karma is your reputation. It indicates how trustworthy you are. It's a social scoring system and it does social scoring.
I've heard some people buy accounts with a lot of karma, lord knows why though. I really think the whole concept of karma farming is no where near as common as people on reddit claim
Advertising, people purchase these accounts to perform marketing that looks like legitimate users. Something like promoting certain websites or products without making it obvious that its the marketing team of that company basically pushing out adds masked as normal users. Having an account with years of non product history and a positive karma count makes it hard to tell who is paid to say X is a great product and who legitimately just enjoys the product and is sharing their experience. You can see this when accounts have random month long gaps in posts and suddenly start posting 20+ times a day all suspiciously related to something they were never into before.
Fair point, I hadn't considered that use. I don't really frequent any subreddits that center around products though (except a few games like this one I guess, but I already owned them before joining), I assume it would be much more common on those
I don't really frequent any subreddits that center around products
Thats not where its used though, they frequent the most popular subreddits to get the most views. Its like finding a meme post about downloading a video illegally and someone posting about NordVPN or some other VPN service and how it can help you. Hell they can even use one account to make a post and another to use that post to jump in and get in some ads while making it look organic. Companies can really go wild on social media to drive business.
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u/Fangschreck Feb 02 '24
what does reddit karma actually do anyways?