Horrible Gelatinous Blob wrote:

I believe in posts, not in posters.

On the spectrum of how much a message board focuses on posts versus the poster, it goes 4chan -> Caltrops -> Qt3 and every other vB type forum -> Disqus comments -> Reddit.

People are naturally drawn to create and venerate cults of personality, on scales small and large. 4chan and Caltrops do away with many of the arbitrary conventions that are improperly used to rank the value of a poster: join date, post count, verifiable poster identity. If one wants to elevate a poster, one has to do so based upon posts alone. It's not perfect, but it's better.

If one is interested in good posts and nothing else, 4chan is the ideal. Every post stands on its own. What you posted yesterday is less than irrelevant; it literally no longer exists. Tripfags are rightfully shunned and mocked because the only motivation behind an identity that lasts longer than a given thread is ego, and ego is superfluous to a good post. New posters and long-time posters exist only as concepts. A good post is not just its own reward; it's the only reward.

Vested Id wrote:

Karma means people value what you say. Sometimes it's bullshit (making the right remark at the right time), but most of the time it's not any more imaginary than any other type of currency.

Karma doesn't mean that people value what you say. Karma means that you managed to convince a certain amount of a certain kind of people to click the upvote button. Nothing more, nothing less.

Reddit is the worst of them all because it gives its users tools to elevate posters via the illusion of elevating posts. If one is interested in "community" and other constructions that have nothing at all to do with the quality of posts but rather reward posters who understand how to play the metagame, Reddit is hard to beat. There is little insularity when it comes to the site as a whole, meaning a new user who understands the system can rapidly game it, although that gaming will be transparent to others via your post history. So now there's an additional layer to the metagame; if you're going to manipulate the system, you have to do it in a way that the userbase will approve of, like drawing pictures of posts or playing to some juvenile gimmick with every post. Like every system that purports to give control to its users, it's constructed to reward those who are good at getting upvotes, not those who write good posts.

Have you been to a typical Reddit thread? People telling boring stories that are irrelevant to the topic at hand. If they're not boring, they're obviously and poorly fabricated. Arms breaking right and left from all of the back-patting over how moral and righteous they are. People upvoted simply because they post to the exclusion of everything else in their lives. The worst running jokes of any website ever. There is a definite dominant culture at Reddit and it results in a shit-ton of posts that are specifically and carefully tailored to what the average Redditor responds to, i.e. crap.

I'm not going to lie and say that there's nothing useful or entertaining on the site, or that I never visit it. But when you introduce any kind of voting mechanism into a message board environment, the focus of the majority of users immediately changes towards amassing as many indicators of quality as possible, and actually producing things of quality is the sucker's way of achieving that goal.