Journal of Peer ProductionISSN: 2213-5316 http://peerproduction.net

‘Karma, Precious Karma!’ Karmawhoring on Reddit and the Front Page’sEconometrisation

Annika Richterich

Abstract:

In Reddit’s numerous topical subsections, so called subreddits, users post and share diverse content. The social news aggregator claims to be ‘a website abouteverything, powered by community, democracy and you’ (Figure 1). However, one can observe internal conflicts which indicate discrepancies between suchidealistic claims as opposed to quantitatively-oriented participation. While some users emphasise topically focused motivations for their participation, otherssuggest that they mainly post content with the aim of collecting ‘Karma-points’. The latter approach has been called ‘Karmawhoring’. The term referencesReddit’s ranking and evaluation system through the allocation of Karma-points. This paper examines how such a quantification of user participationinfluences interactions and content posted on Reddit. By looking at participatory practices and users’ interplay, it investigates opposing justifications andcontroversial incentives for contributions. It analyses particular cases of Karmawhoring, user criticisms of such merely achievement-oriented contributions aswell as attempts to counteract (alleged) ‘Karmawhores’. The website’s ranking system is described as strategy that aims at decentralising the governance ofcontent: it leaves the subjective determination of quality criteria to the crowd. The aforementioned conflict between idealistically and quantitatively motivatedcontributions has however led to a discrepancy between value assessments of content. The numerical representation of a contribution’s value through Karma-points, calculated by users’ up- and downvotes, does not function as uncontested signal of content quality. Instead, Karma-points have been criticised by userssince they seem to economise participation and inhibit innovative content. Such an ‘econometrisation’ of participation particularly appears to be a result of thecommunity’s rapid growth in scale. A focus on achieving Karma-points becomes primarily appealing once the visibility of communication is regulated by avast amount of users and interpersonal feedback becomes less likely. Subsequently, Karma functions as main, quasi-monetary incentive and reward ofparticipation. By analysing Karmawhoring and its criticism on Reddit, this paper describes how users’ claimed social values and the website’s quantitativevaluation of content fall apart.

Keywords: Reddit, participatory media, social news media, gift economy, econometrisation, karma and value, governance

Annika Richterich

1. Introduction

Reddit is a social news aggregator topically divided into varioussubsections, so-called subreddits. Users, most of whom have never metone another, share personal experiences, give each other advice, support e-learning, or even send each other gifts. Besides submitting posts,registered ‘Redditors’ can up- or downvote other users’ contributions.Their voting has the dual function of ranking content and likewiseenabling the collection of Karma-points. While up- and downvotesindicate the feedback to a contribution through a direct, numericalrepresentation of negative and positive assessment, Karma-points arecalculated by an algorithm which takes into account factors such as thedate of a post or its classification as initial link or added comment.Depending on the topical subreddit, reasons for considering a contributionas ‘(un-)valuable’ and signalling such an evaluation throughup-/downvotes or comments may be helpfulness, informativity,provocativeness, creativity, or wittiness.

Figure 1: Screenshot excerpt of Reddit’s frontpage, available at:http://www.reddit.com/, accessed on 2 May 2013

The notion of value is crucial in this context, since recent developments onReddit suggest that the numerical representation of a contribution’sappreciation often deviates from users’ qualitative assessments. Criticalcomments or discussions regarding ranking issues on Reddit show thatKarma is a contested quality-indicator. Karma-points might suggest a highvalue by representing a large amount of upvotes, however within thecommunity one can observe controversies that the allocation of Karma-points and a (subjective) quality of Reddit’s content may stand in contrastto each other. Instead of acting as reliable signal of a post’s/comment’svalue and quality, Karma-points are meanwhile considered as a symbol forquantitatively oriented content selection.

Crucial internal conflicts and critical discussions regarding developmentson Reddit have evolved around the notion of ‘Karmawhoring’. Whilesome Redditors insist on following somehow altruistic, topically focusedmotives for their participation, others suggest that they mainly post contentwith the aim of collecting Karma-points. Such a quantitatively-orientedparticipation has been called Karmawhoring. The term references Reddit’saforementioned ranking system in which contributions are evaluated byallocating Karma-points. The term does not merely refer to a pejorativedesignation by critical users, but is also self-referentially applied by userswho admit to Karma-oriented posting strategies (seewww.reddit.com/r/upvote or www.reddit.com/r/karmawhore).

As Reagle (2013) points out, the notion ‘Karmawhore’ as well as theevaluation metaphor ‘Karma’ originally arose from Slashdot. The socialnews website is focused on science and technology related topics. Theearliest use of the term dates back to January 2000, when it was mentionedin a comment’s subject header: ‘the karma whore/no lifer’ (seehttp://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3199&cid=1415776). OnSlashdot, users’ comments are evaluated by moderators who attributepoints to comments. Those points are then translated into users’ overall‘Karma’. Similarly to the dynamics on Reddit ‘[...] users accumulate

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karma for positive contributions, including posting content and commentsand moderating others’ contributions. However, some users attempted togain karma using tactics that were of little or negative value’. (Reagle2013)

Particularly in combination with the rapidly growing amount of Redditors,it seems that the possibility to quantify participation through Karma-pointshas led to an ‘econometrisation’ of users’ involvement. The term isderived from ‘econometrics’ referring to the utilisation of statisticalmethods, mathematics and digital visualisation for economic data analysisand performance optimisation (see Wooldridge 2012;Geweke/Horowitz/Pesaran 2008). Here, the concept of econometrisationshall indicate users’ tendency to post content depending on its likeliness toappeal to a vast majority of Redditors. It addresses users’ monitoring andstrategic anticipation of quantitative indicators such as Karma-points andadditional statistics, as for example provided by karmawhores.net. Thosequantifying features facilitate economised usage practices which aim atoptimising participation in terms of maximised numeric feedback.

For December 2013, Reddit registered 2,424,880 logged in Redditors and100,744,653 unique visitors (seewww.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic). Seeing these numbers, directtextual interactions are obviously difficult to achieve and merely happenon subreddits with a small amount of subscribers. Since such interactionsare becoming less and less likely (due to the scale of the community), thequantification of feedback through Karma-points acts as a crucial incentivefor contributions. Communication is often reduced to an exchange ofKarma-points. Therefore, users are more likely to pursue an efficient,output oriented participation in terms of maximising Karma-feedback.Quantifying participation through Karma-points leads to an adjustmentcontent-choices and contributions. Such an econometrisation ofparticipation, according to criteria which enhance the chances of achievingKarma, consequently influences the type of content present on Reddit.Once a majority of users chooses content which they deem most likely toappeal to the lowest common denominator among a user group, repetitiverather than innovative or controversial content is encouraged.

In the following section, I will introduce Reddit in more detailed.Subsequently, I will look at particular cases of Karmawhoring andexamine users? critique of such merely quantitatively-orientedcontributions as well as attempts to counteract (alleged) Karmawhores. Indoing so, I will discuss how the quantification of participation throughKarma-points shapes and economises users’ interactions.

2. Reddit: ‘the front page of the internet’

Reddit was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in June 2005.They sold their project to Condé Nast Publications in October 2006. Withregards to how much Reddit was sold for, Ohanian said in an interview:‘You can Google it, and you’ll find it was between $10 million and $20million.’ (Lagorio-Chafkin 2012) In 2012, it was estimated to be worthcontroversial amounts somewhere in between 50 million and 700 millionUSD (see Greenfield 2012). Since June 2008, Reddit is an Open SourceProject: most of the codes and libraries are freely accessible on Githubunder a Common Public Attribution License (seehttps://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/API).

What you first see when you go on Reddit.com is the so called ‘frontpage’ which contains topically-varied posts from diverse subreddits. Theorder of these contributions can be ranked by the criteria ‘hot, new, rising,controversial, top, saved’; the default view is set to ‘hot’. Theaforementioned categories represent different algorithms that determineaccording to which selection criteria posts are being arranged.

User interactions on Reddit mainly start from initial posts.i Those maycontain questions, statements, stories, recent news, external links, pictures,videos and so forth. Posts are classified as ‘self-posts’ which do notcontain links to external websites, or ‘link-posts’. ‘Self-posts’ cannot

receive Karma-points. Users can comment on both types of posts, ormerely up-/downvote them. Their comments again can receive Karma-points. Users do not need to be registered in order to read posts, but anaccount is necessary to contribute actively. Registration does notnecessarily require users to provide their email or any personal details.This facilitates the creation of fake accounts which are then used in orderto upvote posts from another account by the same user. Many Redditorsappear to have several accounts: such as a NSFW (not-safe-for-work/porn)and a more sanitised, office-friendly account. This relates to subscriptionsof particular subreddits as well as Reddit’s bookmarking function.

Users can create subreddits dedicated to issues of their choice. Originally,Reddit’s front page used to be a subreddit itself, but nowadays acts as partof the website’s gratification system since only highly rated orcontroversial posts will appear there. ‘Making it to the front page’ istherefore also an incentive for posting content that has a potential to gain alot of upvotes (ranked: top) or results in controversial assessments (ranked:controversial). The algorithms which are responsible for ranking thesecontributions take into account the relations between up- and downvotes apost has received so far, the amount of comments as well as the timepassed by since the content has been posted (see Yeo 2012 for a moredetailed description). Besides achieving up- and downvotes for acontribution which leads to the achievement of Karma, users can also gainvirtual awards (see http://www.reddit.com/wiki/awards). These trophiesare placed as thumbnails on the respective user page (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Screenshot excerpt of Anomander’s user page, available at:http://www.reddit.com/user/ Anomander, accessed on 7 January 2014

Currently there are 339,585 subreddits (January 2014, see

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http://metareddit.com). The most accessed thread so far was a so called‘AMA’ (Ask-Me-Anything): a question and answer session given by U.S.President Barack Obama in August 2012 (seehttp://locatingthesocial.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/the-obama-ama). Itreceived 5,598,171 page views which is more than double than the secondmost accessed thread on Reddit in 2012. Subreddits which new users areby default opted into are ‘technology’, ‘music’, ‘gaming’, ‘funny’,‘worldnews’, ‘science’ and ‘politics’. It is common to use browser add-ons such as the ‘Reddit Enhancement Suite’ which allows for additionalfeatures and individual customisation.

The traffic generated on Reddit functions as incentive for embeddedadvertisement and sponsored links (see http://www.reddit.com/ad_inq).Advertisements may refer to diverse products and services such asnewspaper subscriptions, online games, or merchandise from Reddit’smarketplace (http://redditgifts.com/marketplace/). Users participating inthe aforementioned ‘redditgifts’ exchanges can (but do not have to) buytheir gifts from Reddit’s internal marketplace (seehttp://redditgifts.com/about/). Reddit’s business model is currently basedon advertisement and merchandising sales through the marketplace as wellas paid subscriptions. Shih (2013) described the marketplace a ‘geek-culture bazaar’ and as ‘step towards a milestone it [Reddit] has beentrying to reach since its founding in 2005: profitability’. ‘Reddit gold’ isthe website’s paid premium membership program which provides userswith additional features.

3. Incentives for Participation: ‘Upvote if youlike bacon’

I approach Reddit as platform of peer production and collaboration. Theterm indicates ‘[…] a subset of commons-based production practices. Itrefers to production systems that depend on individual action that is self-selected and decentralized, rather than hierarchically assigned.’ (Benkler2006, p. 62) The discursive threads which evolve through contributions ofvarious registered users are the core of Reddit’s user generated content,and form the website’s product. Those combinations of an initial post andsubsequent comments constitute the collaborative, intellectual product.

Since input is neither monetarily rewarded nor defined by objective marketregulations, one is left wondering about alternative incentives, as well asvalue assessments of Redditors’ efforts. Benkler identifies the differencebetween ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ motivation as key feature of peerinvolvement.ii While extrinsic motivations involve distinct, externalinducements (f.i. money, reputation or quantifiable rewards such as Karma-points), intrinsically motivated actions exclusively affect a person’sinternal state, such as happiness or personal fulfilment (see e.g. Ryan/Deci2000).

On Reddit, peer production and users’ interactions appear to be tornbetween (at least) two main motives for contributions: on the one hand,there are users who emphasize the importance of topical variety andcontent quality. They perceive a (self-)responsibility to ensure that thevalue of a contribution corresponds to its benefit to the community. Surely,I cannot verify whether this is their actual motivation, but merely reflecton the communication of such incentives. On the other hand, users revealan interest in maximising their Karma-points. Such ‘powerusers’ followan extrinsic motivation by pursuing strategies of Karmawhoring.

As mentioned before, the allocation of Karma does only account for link-posts: self-posts (text-posts) are not eligible to achieve any points. Thisgratification logic is already a result from past strategies to exhaust Karma-feedback. The discussion below explains the development: a user whoseaccount has since been deleted asked ‘Self posts get no karma, eventhough 99% of the good stuff on reddit is self-posts? Shouldn’t it be theother way around—you get karma for things YOU have written, not justlinked to?’ In this context, the user Anomander replies:

‘Self posts used to give karma, this was disabled because

‘UPVOTE IF YOU LIKE BACON’ was an honest to godkarmawhoring strategy, and in such great effect and quantity thatthey were deemed problematic and there were concerns they weretaking over from legitimate content. I think the top story from thetime was ‘upvote this if you think George Bush is a shittypresident.’ No content, no discussion, no effort from OP, just a lotof people agreeing that GB looks like a chimp and was unfit foroffice.’ (source)

This explanation indicates that the possibility to collect Karma encouragesa user behaviour which might not endeavour to contribute to livelydiscussions, but merely aims at maximising upvotes. Such self-posts werenot conducive to encouraging textual interaction or provokingcontroversial discussions (since that could have led to downvotes as well).Rather they aimed at affecting mass agreement expressed in pre-definedyes/no options of up-/downvotes. Also, they were mainly concerned withminor issues with a high likeliness of compliance. In this sense, disablingthe collection of Karma points through self-posts is an early example ofimplemented counter strategies in order to ensure a certain quality ofReddit’s overall content, topical variety and depth.

It has already been pointed out that involvement of users in peer-production may not be regulated by conventional property- and contract-based logics as is the case for companies or markets. It differs from profit-oriented, private business production as well as from public production bystate enterprises since its ‘[...] product is not exchange value for a market,but use-value for a community of users’ (Bauwens 2006, p. 1). However,recent dynamics on Reddit indicate that there is a tendency to createsubstitutes for monetary achievement measurements: quantitativeassessments of social media participation through likes, upvotes, trophies,awards or (Karma) document a transfer from gaming elements into socialmedia contexts. More generally, such developments have been describedin terms of ‘gamification’.

Econometrisation and Reactivity

‘Gamification’—a term coined by Nick Pelling in 2002—has been depictedas ubiquitous, though somehow transparent layer of social media (seeZichermann/Cunningham 2012; Fuchs 2012; O’Brien 2010). The conceptwhich informs website designs encouraging users’ active participation,originally started as a project to rework electronic devices. Pelling himselfwrote about his idea that he ‘[...] coined the deliberately ugly word‘gamification’, by which I meant applying game-like accelerated userinterface design to make electronic transactions both enjoyable and fast.’(Pelling 2011) Today, the concept mostly describes the transfer ofelements, typically known from video/computer games, into non-gamingcontexts. Gamification refers to ‘[t]he process of game-thinking and gamemechanics to engage users and to solve problems’(Zichermann/Cunningham 2012: xiv). On Reddit, Karma-points and, to alesser extent, trophies (Figure 2) could be conceptualised as elements ofgamification and incentives for active participation.

With regards to the effects that such elements yield in social mediacontexts, gamification however seems to be a misleading, uncriticalconcept. Social media platforms act as crucial, shaping intermediaries: incontrast to games, they do not offer fixed procedures in order to gainachievements and rewards of participation. Following a game’s pre-defined structure will usually lead to predictable in-game rewards. Socialmedia users, however, do not interact with a calculable programme. If theywant to gain rewards for their participation, they have to acquaintthemselves with comparatively more complex, often unstable rankinglogics, audience preferences and communication habits of the respectivesocial media. In order to achieve and maximise feedback—or rathergratification, they adjust their social media participation to an assumedaudience and to the structure provided by the respective platform. For

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these reasons, I have chosen to speak of econometrisation in order to stresseconomic imperatives and their qualitative impacts on users’ posts ratherthan indicating ludic motives.

Karma-points should therefore not be seen as descriptive measurements orneutral inducement. Instead, platforms such as Reddit influence andeconomise the very processes they claim to reflect. As Gillespie shows inan analysis of the trope ‘platform’, this concept has been heavilyinstrumentalised in favour of marketing so-called web 2.0 online services.In these contexts, it dissembles ‘[...] a functional shape: it suggests aprogressive and egalitarian arrangement, lifting up those who stand uponit.’ (Gillespie 2009, p. 8) It is however important to understand the socialmedia platforms as the exact opposite of a ‘carrier’ and expression ofusers’ interaction:

‘[C]ommercial Web 2.0 platforms are not simply about facilitatinguser-produced content and carrying content across networks tolarge audiences or ‘end-users’; rather, they are primarilyconcerned with establishing the technocultural conditions withinwhich users can produce content and within which content andusers can be re-channelled through techno-commercial networksand channels.’ (Langlois et al. 2009)

In that very sense, the quantification of user participation on Reddit doesnot merely measure, but produces user practices aiming at optimisedKarma-outputs. This type of performance is shaped in anticipation ofReddit’s ranking logics and evaluation mechanisms. Those mechanismsagain are aimed at optimising the website’s conditions for achieving profitthrough advertisement, sponsored links or merchandising. In this sense,site traffic and user numbers are placed above topical depth of interactionsand discussions—as long as those are not expressed in quantificationswhich influence the economic potential of Reddit.

More generally, such interdependencies have been described as issue ofreactivity: ‘In sociology, reactivity is usually depicted as a methodologicalproblem. Campbell’s (1957, p. 298) classic statement de?nes a reactivemeasure as one that ‘modi?es the phenomenon under study, whichchanges the very thing that one is trying to measure.’ Reactivity blurs thedistinction between the act of measuring and its object which‘contaminates’ results.’ (Espeland/Sauder 2007, p. 3)iii While Karma-points are presented as tool which reflects and documents participation,users in fact start to interact with the points themselves. Practices such asKarmawhoring only result from the fact that users’ behaviour is measured.In that sense, quantifying elements are functional constituents which shapesocial media platforms in favour of economic demands and profitability.

4. Case Analyses: ‘Karma, precious Karma!’

Considering the spiritual background of Karma as a core concept ofreligions such as Sikh or Buddhism, the term implies very distinctconnotations. Even though the meaning of ‘Karma’ differs slightly withinthe respective religions, a common denominator is the belief in a directrelation between cause and effect. The impacts of any behaviour may onlybe perceivable in another, following life, but they are necessarilyinterlinked with the personal behaviour. Hence, ‘Karma’ also refers to aconviction that any event expresses justice.

As part of its ‘About’ information, Reddit already anticipates thequestions of ‘Why should I contribute?’ in terms of ‘Why should I try toaccumulate Karma?’ (see www.reddit.com/wiki/faq):

‘Why should you try to score points in a video game? Why shouldyour favorite sports team try to win the championship? Or, to lookat things from a less competitive and more altruistic perspective,read what philosophers have said about the matter—namely, don’t

set out to accumulate karma; just set out to be a good person, andlet your karma simply be a reminder of your legacy’.

This reasoning refers to an internalized logic of collecting points which iswell-known from games and sports. It does so without questioning theparticular gratification mechanisms behind such endeavours. Moreover, itrefers to a ‘do good—feel good’ mentality which is meant to providebenefits for altruistic user behaviour in a rather spiritual way.

Despite this idealistic framework, increasingly Karma-orientedcontributions can be observed in several forms among Redditors andcurrently polarise the overall user group. In the following sections, I willanalyse particular examples for this development.

Karmawhoring and Redditors’ Criticisms

A rather simple case of Karmawhoring is embodied in posts providingnarrative teasers of possible stories. The respective users assure theywould be willing to tell more, if only other users would upvote the post inadvance. Hence, the effort of participation is only made under thecondition of a noticeable reward. In a thread on sexual encounters withprostitutes a user wrote, for example: ‘I’d go into a lot more detail if Iknew there was a chance that people would see the comment—so I’ll see ifthis has any replies before I spend any time writing stuff out’ (see Figure3; the original post has since been deleted). Seeing that a main way toensure that a post has gained attention is through the numericalmeasurement of Karma-points, the user awaits other users’ feedback as aquasi-monetary prepayment. S/he does not mainly express a desire to sharea story and information, but aims at ensuring that the contribution gainsquantifiable attention.

Figure 3: Screenshot excerpt of a thread on reddit.com, the source has beendeleted, accessed on 29/01/2013

Avoiding self-posts which are not eligible to receive Karma, or repostingformer self-posts as links to screenshots (mainly uploaded on imgur.com)is another strategy of Karmawhoring. In this context, the subreddit r/keto(which topically focuses on Ketogenic dieting) has even excluded thepossibility of posting links, since it disables Karma-oriented posting. In thebeginning of 2013, it was announced that ‘/r/keto goes self-post only toincrease post quality’ (source). One reason for this was a moderator’s link-repost of another user’s self-post—which resulted in an outraged discussion(see Figure 4): ‘Scumbag mod[erator]… Hides my self-post thanking themods for the achievement and links an image to reap the karma’.

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Figure 4: Screenshot excerpt, available at:www.reddit.com/r/keto/comments/15txl6/weve_reached_50000_subscribers_congratulations/, accessed on 15/07/2013

A main reason for critical comments on Karmawhoring is that those usersaddress the lowest common denominator and usually extend alreadypopular topics. In particular, reposting quantitatively ‘successful’ contentinhibits the innovative potential of contributions. The importance ofappealing to many users, may also explain the success of highly repetitivememes such as ‘grumpy cat’ or ‘paranoid parrot’. The figures 4 and 5moreover suggest that the discussion of Karmawhoring has affected thecreation of memes itself. On Reddit, the challenge of addressing a masssocial media audience partly undermines users’ reasons to contribute withposts that encourage more than up-/downvoting or leaving a short, wittycomment. Such a development—and this is a trend that particularly long-term Redditors render problematic—results in (subjectively determined)lower quality content. In a thread which explicitly questioned the meaningof the term Karmawhore, the user ‘ascendant23’ commented critically:

‘Karmawhore means someone who submits cheap, circlejerkyposts, or appeals to the lowest common denominator in order tomax out their karma. In more or less the same reason why, in othercreative endeavors, the effort that makes the most money isn’tnecessarily the most culturally or artistically valuable. And some ofus view some of those creators as not even trying to make anythingartistically or culturally meaningful, but generally lowering theoverall quality of both while cashing in a fat paycheck. Karmawhore means basically the same thing, except they’re makingkarma points rather than, you know, actual money.’ (source)

The comparison between Karma and money as well as the mentionedcriticism refer to evaluation criteria which are not guided by the numericalvalue of a post. Instead, s/he uses a subjectively determined understandingof quality which involves aspects such as innovation, news value andartistic impression. Even though these characteristics will certainly varyfrom person to person, a main commonality is an endeavour to followidealistic values which may be compared to the mantra of ‘art for art’ssake’.

It is particularly interesting that even the wording of this comment refers tosome of Benkler’s early observations in peer production. As he wrote,‘[...] it begins with the opposite of lowest common denominator. It beginswith what irks you, the contributing peer, individually, the most.’ (Benkler2006, p. 259) According to the aforementioned user, this characteristiccannot be claimed for parts of Reddit’s production logic. Instead for some,Karma-points function as equivalent to monetary reward: theypredominantly post content according to selection criteria—such as thepopularity of certain topics, genres or memes—which will maximisepositive feedback and hence Karma.

Figure 5: Meme template hinting at a de-valuation of Karma-points,available at: http://i.qkme.me/3u0vsc.jpg, accessed on 15/07/2013

Figure 6: Meme template addressing the possibility to employ Karma-critique as strategy to gain Karma-points, available at:http://i.qkme.me/3thtfq.jpg, accessed on 15/07/2013

Users show a particular critical assessment of Karmawhoring in caseswhere rather emotional, sensible topics are discussed. After the death ofJames Gandolfini in June 2013, a user posted the actor’s picture alongwith the comment ‘Rest In Peace, James Gandolfini.’ (source). As highestranked ‘top’-comments one could then read other users’ controversialreactions: ‘The last thing he said was ‘don’t use me to get imaginarypoints on that website you visit with the cats’’, ‘Honestly this is reallyjust shamelessly cashing in on his death for karma’, but also: ‘There’smore karma going around to the people bitching about others trying to getit than there actually is going to the karma whores themselves’.

One main reason for the critique of users who are mainly posting in orderto accumulate Karma is that they merely multiply content at the expense ofReddit’s uniqueness and quality. A similar claim is that the multiplicationof Redditors (due to its recent popularisation) has had a similar effect, andthat only niche-subreddits with a small number of contributors allow fornon-hierarchical communication:

‘The worst thing about Reddit is how hard it is to become part of

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the conversation. By the time you notice something on the frontpage, unless you’re replying to a reply to a top comment, there’sno way anybody is ever going to see whatever it is you have to say.[...] The smaller sub-reddits that I post in (r/lawschool and r/vegan,for example) usually have interesting content when I visit and theyhave small but devoted communities. But the nice thing is notbeing drowned out if you feel you have something to add to aconversation’ (source).

This statement also feeds into an argument which I made earlier: that theincreasing number of users and the popularisation of Reddit discourages in-depth discussion and instead promotes expressions of dis-/approval byquickly up- or downvoting posts.

In contrast to other social media such as Facebook or Twitter which bothoffer platform features allowing for an ‘accountability’ of originalcontributions as well as their re-distribution (seePaßmann/Boschoeten/Schäfer 2013), the numerical feedback mechanismson Reddit remain anonymous. While the ‘Like’-button on Facebookreveals which users supported a contribution and—as the aforementionedauthors describe—retweeting and faving on Twitter is often clusteredaround networks between socially tied accounts, Reddit does notencourage reciprocity on such a basic, platform-structural level. Interactionvia Twitter and Facebook may be compared to an iterated prisoner’sdilemma where the likeliness of cooperation and sharing are encouraged,since participants know that they will have to interact again. Hence, theyare more likely to show balanced reciprocity. Reddit meanwhile onlyoffers very limited, vague possibilities to verify that a user has beensupporting a specific post or account. Besides personally assuring orexplicating their support in eventual face-to-face communication,comments or messages, up- and downvotes cannot be used as acommunicative medium of verified exchange, since the voting accountsstay anonymous.

Partially, this condition has been circumvented through so-called ‘votingcliques’, where a group of accounts consistently and repeatedly votes onspecific content’ (source). In these cases, a repeated and (roughly)numerical distinct number of upvotes ensures the reliability of a social sub-network. This problem has been identified by Reddit already however andis being addressed through (temporary) account bans. Anonymisedup-/downvotes and the large scale of Reddit users prevent rankings thatmainly derive from personal relations between users. This makes itsrankings less prone to biases as, for example, Reagle described them forthe photo sharing platform photo.net: ‘Quantitative mechanisms begettheir manipulation: people ‘mate’ rated friends, ‘revenge’ rated enemies,and inflated their own standing. ‘Fixes’ to manipulation have their own,often unintended, consequences and are also susceptible to manipulation:non-anonymous ratings led to rating inflation.’ (Reagle 2013)

Supporting a specific account is therefore either an expression ofparticularly liking the respective content or is based on a social relationaccompanied by such a strong trust in the other person’s reciprocalsupport that any further assurance of it is no longer necessary. Such anevaluation system also implies that building and relying on social ties ishighly risky since there is no possibility of validating your peer-group’ssupport. Up- and downvoting on Reddit cannot follow any reliable signalsthat would allow for account-bound reciprocity between strangers.Moreover, the scale that is required to achieve top-rankings is numericallytoo high in order to be achievable through mere networking (automatedvote cheating, which I will describe further on, may circumvent this). Thedecision to up- or downvote a post therefore tends to be based onindividual content evaluations, or a (content-related) basic affection for oraversion to another user’s account. Nevertheless, an analysis of ‘in-real-life’ (IRL) meetings of Redditors could be additionally insightful forfurther studies.

Karmawhoring and Counter-Strategies

On www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette one can find Reddit’s collectivelywritten and continuously changing ‘reddiquette’. The rules are meant toinstruct users’ interactions and reflect an ideal code of conduct. Byexplicitly referring to unwanted behaviour, the Reddiquette also indicates ahistory of previous Karmawhoring approaches—some of which one can stillobserve. One main rule listed in the guideline is: ‘Don’t… try tomanipulate the voting mechanism’. This includes, for example, thefollowing tactics:

‘Send out IMs, tweets, or any other message asking people to votefor your submission—or comply when other people ask you. Thiswill result in a ban from the admins. Your submission should getpoints for being good, not because the submitter is part of a votingclique.’

‘Create mass downvote or upvote campaigns. This includesattacking a user’s profile history when they say something bad andparticipating in karma party threads.’ (This kind of massdownvoting has been called witch-hunting, seewww.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/wiki/witchhunting).

There are several disciplinary strategies to counteract Karmawhoringwhich can be differentiated into bottom-up and top-down mechanisms.The Reddiquette is an example for a top-down attempt to prevent Karma-oriented postings. It condemns user behaviour exclusively aiming ataccumulating Karma, appeals to idealistic, moral ambitions andencourages an impartial evaluation of content. Additionally, there seem tobe three main disciplinary mechanisms: direct censorship through top-down interventions by moderators/administrators; self-discipline andconscious maintenance of non-repetitive content; community disciplineand downvoting of presumable Karmawhores. The last two examples areforms of bottom-up governance.

Example for direct censorship and top-down strategies are interventionsmade by moderators who warn users, delete content or (shadow-)banindividual Redditors for violating reddiquette. This aspect also makes clearthat examples of Karmawhoring are either particularly and very volatile(since they may be subject to enforced deletion), or rather ambiguous casesof Karmawhoring which may be disputed, or they are merely reflected inmeta-discussions. This is a structural condition for any analysis ofKarmawhoring since its object of interest is potentially subjected to‘extinction’. Cases where one can still observe moderators’ interventionare usually documented by their official statements. This is, for example,the case in /r/leagueoflegends, an e-sports subreddit. In this context amoderator addressed the problem of vote-cheating. After defining vote-cheating as something ‘inorganically being done to manipulate votes on apost or comment’, the moderator countered users’ reactions to thenegative enforcement:

‘If we catch an account or set of accounts vote cheating on reddit,then there is a good chance we’ll take some sort of action againstthose accounts (such as banning). The reason I’m directly bringingthis up on the big e-sports related subreddits is that the problem ofvote cheating has started to become very commonplace here. It isdamn near ‘expected behaviour’ in some folks eyes, so recentbanning incidents have been met with arguments such as‘everyone does it!’—this is not an acceptable excuse.’ (source)

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The same message has been placed in other subreddits such as /r/starcraft,and /r/DotA2. It indicates the necessity of direct administrativeintervention in order to minimise the dominance of posts that are gettingupvoted due to unfair competition. An example for automated votecheating is described in the blogpost ‘Cheating Reddit—Auto Votes’(source).

Such an intervention also raises issues of governance in peer production. Ihave stated before that Reddit’s content can hardly be judged according toconsistent, objectively definable good/bad criteria. In this sense, it differsfrom peer production cases where small, expert communities worktogether towards an aim whose success can be easily defined by objectivecriteria, where contributions can easily be classified as(counter-)productive. This difference implies that governance and controlof content through administrators on Reddit are defined by subjectivecriteria and are often a topic of negotiation themselves. It also shows thatgovernance through ‘charismatic leadership’ such as referred to in formerstudies on peer production of Wikipedia (see O’Neil 2011) or freesoftware (see Dafermos 2012) is ruled out due to the scale andheterogeneity of the Reddit community. Topical or charismatic authoritymay only exist in distinct, smaller subreddits. Since content cannot bedefined as verifiable knowledge anymore, but instead is classified asentertainment or art, its judgement therefore becomes a ‘question of taste’and authority based on specific ‘knowledge’ and performance can hardlybe claimed.

These differences can also be explained in terms of Stalder’s analysis of‘expressive’ and ‘functional’ domains of cultural productions. Stalderdiscusses why the free and open source software movement (FOSS) hasbeen so successful while cultural, literary or artistic production has notexperienced such a strong decentralisation and de-commercialisation underthe influence of digital technologies. He suggests that characteristics ofSoftware development—such as the possibility for modular, collaborativeproduction—can only rarely be reproduced by cultural projects. Accordingto Stalder, cultural projects ‘[...] face two problems. If they are of an‘expressive’ type, then the communities that agree on quality standardsare so small that collaboration tends to be more club-like than open source.Even if the works are functional, like Wikipedia, the challenge ofdetermining who is an expert without relying on conventional credentialsis significant.’ (Ibid. 2007)

In this sense, Reddit’s Karma-system and the possibility ofup-/downvoting is a way to deal with the challenge of creating consentregarding quality criteria of cultural content. Depending on the subreddit,some assessments can be substantiated rather objectively by moderators.This accounts for example for the various science forums (such asr/askscience or r/sciencediscussion) which can be considered as examplesfor ‘functional cultural projects’. Other subreddits, such as r/funny orvisually oriented forums such as r/pics are rather ‘expressive types’ andcome along with highly subjective, controversial quality criteria. Hence,by enabling the allocation of Karma-points, Reddit aims at decentralisingthe governance of content, leaving the decision of its subjective quality tothe crowd.

The intervention of administrators shows however that such a bottom-upcontrol only works to some extent and needs some additional, authoritarianinterference from time to time. On r/science for example, the denial ofclimate change has been generally banned. On most subreddits, users areasked to read and consider the respective rules for posting content.Inappropriate posts can be deleted and users might be banned for a certaintime. Similarly, Loubster and den Besten have described Wikipedia as arather conditionally democratic/egalitarian form of peer production. Theauthors noted that the Online-Encyclopaedia ‘[...] has strayed from itsidealistic origins and has been able to sustain itself only by adapting moreand more of the features found in regular ?rms’ (Loubster/den Besten2008, p. 1).

In addition, users exert bottom-up influence on other users’ behaviour.This kind of community discipline involves for example mass downvoting

that punish a respective user for (allegedly or rather subjectively crowd-defined) ‘bad’ posts. Moreover, the self-reflexive discussion of issues inmeta-comments regarding the development of Reddit can be considered asa peer-to-peer approach that aims to regulate users’ self-discipline. Theyplay a ‘consciousness raising’ role, point out issues on Reddit and reflecton possible reasons, such as this post by a user who questioned theinhibiting impact of default subreddits on traffic in newly foundedsubreddits.

‘The current system of congregation into default subreddits iscausing Reddit to splinter into many offshoot subreddits. Someusers are so deep in the meta/real/true/republicof hole that they donot even participate in the default subreddits. This is a sign thatReddit is getting so top-heavy that people are falling off.Participating in a community with so many voices and differingopinions makes your own opinions feel small and unimportant.You may start to enjoy other people’s voices in the communityless. This might happen until you find a smaller, niche subredditthat fits your interests. This is a sign that Reddit is getting so top-heavy that people are falling off.’ (source)

This post has been submitted to the subreddit ‘Theory of Reddit’ which isdefined as ‘[...] a mildly navel-gazing space for inquiring into what makesReddit communities work and what we in a community can do to helpmake it better’ (source).

In addition to this ‘educational approach’, there are other bottom-upstrategies trying to prevent certain developments which are not intended byReddit’s platform features, but are rather induced by users’ appropriationof the up-/downvote-system. Mass downvoting campaigns can targetcertain user profiles, and punish those users for their posting-behaviour.With ‘mass downvoting campaigns’, I mean cases where a group of usersagrees on collaboratively downvoting a specific post/a certain user.Particularly well-known is the case of the user Apostolate which I willanalyse in the next section.

Peer pressure: ‘Nobody cares, Apostolate’

Apostolate can be regarded as one of Reddit’s most famous, though highlycontroversial ‘celebrities’. S/he belongs to a user group that is registeredon www.karmawhores.net, a website which visualises the quantifiableaspects of Redditing in diagrams (see Figure 7). In July 2013, Apostolatestill led the list of ‘Top comment Karma’ (see Figure 8).

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Figures 7 and 8: Screenshot excerpts showing statistics and visualisationsof Reddit ‘powerusers’, available at: www.karmawhores.net, accessed on08/07/2013

Apart from being a ‘successful Redditor’ in terms of accumulated Karmapoints, Apostolate has become particularly famous after commenting ‘Ihate the movie ‘Avatar.’ on a post by another user starting with thequestion ‘What do you hate that everyone else seems to enjoy?’ (source)This post was submitted on 24th of July 2012. When sorting this thread by‘top’ one of the first comments is ‘HIMYM. Awful, awful show’.Apostolate replied to this comment with a .gif, a moving image, showingthe actor Neil Patrick Harris in ‘How I Met Your Mother’ with themessage ‘You’re a jerk’ (Figure 9). This led, at first, to the repost of auser-generated .gif, containing the message ‘Nobody cares Apostolate’.Gif-replies by the users Quarter_Centenarian (http://imgur.com/s5Rxje)and Drunken_Economist(http://imgur.com/r/NobodyCaresApostolate/Zh2od) have respectivelygained 1,863 and 1,386 Karma points. In the aftermath, plenty of similargifs were produced and became a common reply to any comment or postby Apostolate. The saying has since been frequently referenced on thesubsequently created subreddit /r/nobodycaresapostolate.

Figure 9: Gif screenshot, available at: http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/362/582/bc8.gif, accessed on15/07/2013

The thread described above was even reposted in /r/bestof. Some users’aggression towards Apostolate becomes very obvious in this context, andthe affinity to witch-hunts seems intuitively comprehensible:

Why is this best of? Why do people give a fuck about shit like this?(first comment sorted by ‘top’ or ‘hot’ likewise)

Good, shut that fucking Apostolate dude up. He is a fucking loser.Doesn’t he have any free time to GET OFF THE INTERNET????(first and second comment sorted by controversial)

Briefly before the incident, which led to Apostolate’s comment beingsubjected to repetitive ‘Nobody cares’-replies (as were other commentsby users who were suspected of Karmawhoring), another user pointedtowards Apostolate as a rising power-user. On 22nd of July 2012WuhanWTF posted:

‘Well look over here, there seems to be a new one on the rise:Apostolate. Redditors are swarming around him like flies on shit.[...] I also noticed that, to some degree, he panders to the hivemind.Yesterday I saw him reply to a comment about ‘Myspace Top 8drama’ talking about how people who use that site are retarded.Typical anti-social network circlejerk.’ (source)

More generally, similar comments and community events draw users’attention towards single accounts. Those users subsequently experience therejection and disapproval of the crowd. Such cases are examples ofcommunity discipline and mass-downvotes aiming at affecting a certainuser behaviour. The user can either give up their account and create a newusername (abandoning the collected, non-transferable Karma), show achange in behaviour to calm the angry ‘virtual mob’, or wait and hopethat the aggression might subside over time.

When following Apostolate’s ‘Reddit career’ chronologically by lookingat collected contributions on the user profilewww.reddit.com/user/Apostolate, it seems that overall his performance onReddit became more ironic and reflective. For example, in response to thequestion ‘Who is the most hated Redditor of all time?’ s/he replied‘Haven’t posted as much in about a year :0’ and after another user’scomment that Apostolate was unpopular due to his ‘Karmawhoring’ s/henoted ‘You can’t prove that in court’ (source; Figure 10 and 11).

Figure 10: Reddit thread screenshot, available at:www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1hssjt/who_is_the_most_hated_redditor_of_all_time/cay2985?context=3,accessed on 15/07/2013

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Figure 11: Reddit thread screenshot, available at:www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1hssjt/who_is_the_most_hated_redditor_of_all_time/cay2amz?context=3,accessed on 15/07/2013

Karmawhoring is a phenomenon which can only be determined accordingto very subjective as well as highly normative criteria. In this sense, thecase Apostolate is an example of negotiation processes between certainuser attitudes and social values. A Karmawhoring-critical ‘philosophy’normatively idealises particular contributions: these users emphasise therelevance of intrinsically motivated contributions, benefiting thecommunity. With the practices and strategies I described before, usersexert pressure on peers who deviate from such idealistically inspiredmotivations for contributions.

5. Conclusion: Economised Redditing

Reddit is an insightful example of peer production since it does not merelyinvolve content whose value could be easily defined by objective criteria.While the result of software crowdsourcing, for example, can be rathereasily assessed—basically by if and for what purposes the softwareworks—the (e)valuation of content on Reddit is guided by subjective,interpersonally fluid criteria. As Bauwens writes, peer production projects‘[...] are open to all comers provided they have the necessary skills tocontribute to a project. These skills are verified, and communallyvalidated, in the process of production itself.’ (Bauwens 2006: p. 2) OnReddit however, skills and therefore value can barely be validatedobjectively. As I have argued by analysing cases of Karmawhoring,counterstrategies and internal conflicts on Reddit, the numerical value of acontribution represented by Karma-points does not function as auniversally accepted measurement of qualitative value. Quite the contrary:Karma has gained a reputation for indicating less innovative,mainstreamed content which is able to appeal to social mass mediaaudiences. Hence, one is facing dynamics which seem significant foropposing value evaluations in peer production of cultural content. Thefeatures and criteria which determine the value of a post or comment arecontroversially negotiated among users.

These discrepancies appear to have a historical dimension: in particular,long-term users reject Karma-oriented posting. Opposing Karmawhoringalso complies with an effort to minimise the influence of users who maynot share the principled convictions of early contributors. One has to takeinto account that Reddit started as a community with a sub-cultural appeal,a counter-project to mainstream information and entertainment sources.Conflicts and criticisms among users also document the consequences ofReddit’s more recent popularisation which stands in contrast to its formersub-cultural status. They are highly normative expressions of negotiationsbetween users who claim to represent the ‘traditional’ and idealisticReddit so far, and users who are identified as cause of the various changesin Reddit’s culture and appearance. The contrast between practices of

Karmawhoring and resistance against those powerusers indicates a dividebetween (long-term) Redditors who claim a more intimate knowledge ofthe community and its rules. Early users familiarised themselves withReddit when it was still a comparatively small-scale community. In such acontext, the rules for interactions and the conditions for gainingpositive/negative attention differ from possibilities to be appreciatedamong the vast number of members that Reddit has meanwhile obtained.

‘Digital economies of scale’ are especially relevant here: discussions arefeasible as long as the overall community has a relatively manageable size.The number of users on Reddit however makes it more difficult to providea virtual environment where people may directly engage in discussions.The competition for attention is high, and there are various factors (badtiming, boring topics, badly phrased or titled issues) which may lead toposts and comments being ignored. Breaking the website intomultiplicities of subreddits was one strategy of dealing with this issue, buteven such a strategy only works for some, less popular topics.

Since value on Reddit cannot be conceptualised in terms of following acoherent ‘value theory’, one encounters the depicted clash of asserted usermotivations. On the one hand, there are users who seek to maintain amentality that complies with the concept of ‘gift economy’. Their claimsare very much in line with early hopes accompanying cooperation on theinternet:

‘Within the universities, the gift economy already was the primarymethod of socialising labour. From its earliest days, the technicalstructure and social mores of the Net has ignored intellectualproperty. Although the system has expanded far beyond theuniversity, the self-interest of Net users perpetuates this hi-tech gifteconomy. As an everyday activity, users circulate free informationas e-mail, on listservs, in newsgroups, within on-line conferencesand through Web sites. As shown by the Apache and Linuxprograms, the hi-tech gift economy is even at the forefront ofsoftware development.’ (Barbrook 2005 [1998])

Similar to those early hopes concerning a high-tech gift economy, someRedditors defend their idealistic, not quantitatively aligned motivations forparticipation. Moreover, they describe such an attitude as the community’straditional and preferable state. However, these idealistic, somehowconservative users are confronted with a quasi-monetary econometrisationof participation. The latter, Karma-oriented aspirations promote anadjustment of contributions in favour of their likeliness to appeal to a largenumber of users.

Seeing that I stated that this opposition results from historicaldevelopments and a growing community scale, it is significant that thenotion of ‘gift economy’ has mainly been applied with regards to earlyvirtual communities more generally, as well as to the early stages of morerecent networks. Seven years after publishing the ‘The high-tech gifteconomy’ [1998] Barbrook stated in an interview: ‘In 2005, the dotcomcommodity economy and the hi-tech gift economy are—at one and the sametime—in opposition and in symbiosis with each other.’ (Barbrook 2005)

Even earlier on, Rheingold described the ‘The Whole Earth ’LectronicLink’ (WELL) network as ‘[...] a kind of gift economy in which people dothings for one another out of a spirit of building something between them,rather than a spreadsheet-calculated quid pro quo.’ (Ibid. 1995, p. 59)More recently, Paßmann, Boeschoten and Schäfer (2013) have applied thenotion of ‘gift economy’ in order to describe parts of the German Twitterscene and quantitative monitorings of user participation via ‘favstar’: an‘application that tracks retweets and favourites (called Favs).’ (Ibid., p. 7)They also observed that an ‘[...] inflated number of Favs in question heresheds doubt on their value as a gift’ (Ibid., p. 9).

Similarly on Reddit, Karma-points have lost their commonly accepted

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correlation to content quality. This development indicates a historicaldevelopment throughout which successful strategies in order to achieveattention have significantly changed. Rheingold already acknowledged in1993 that in the virtual community he described ‘[...] elegantly presentedknowledge is a valuable currency. Wit and use of language are rewarded inthis medium, which is biased towards those who learn to manipulateattention and emotion with the written word.’ (Rheingold 1995 [1993], p.59) Hence, adjustments and learning processes in order to appeal toReddit’s community account for Karmawhores and users who claim torepresent altruistic motives likewise. However, the described tensionsshow that the rules and conditions of content appeal have changed withtime.

Cashing-out Karma

Regarding Reddit, Rheingold’s metaphor of rhetoric as currency ishowever not entirely applicable. Users’ participation and input are ratherelements of free labour. As Terranova describes: ‘free labor is the momentwhere this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated intoproductive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same timeoften shamelessly exploited’. (Terranova 2000, p. 37) Users’ knowledgeand skills do not act as type of currency, but they ‘[...] are part of a processof economic experimentation with the creation of monetary value out ofknowledge/culture/affect.’ (Ibid., p. 38) Their input generates the basis foradvertisement, Reddit’s marketplace merchandising and sponsoredlinks—and Karma functions as one incentive to ensure that such a basis ismaintained.

In this context, the status of Karma as potential currency, which means asa medium of exchange for money, should be examined carefully. In fact,meanwhile there are possibilities to ‘cash out’ Karma and to receivemonetary rewards for Reddit input. These are however marginal andmerely seem to play around with the possibility of a (voluntary) paymentfor contributions.

Since September 2012, Redditors can exchange Karma for ‘Bitcoin’, adigital currency (and a peer-to-peer payment system) introduced in 2009(see https://bitcoin.org). However, this exchange can be done one timeonly: the Karma-points lose their monetary exchange value after theirtranslation into Bitcoin. The Karma does also not disappear from therespective account. Hence, as a user put it: ‘It’s not really an ‘exchange’so much as a reward since you’re not losing your karma.’ (source)Furthermore, the exchange rate is low: ‘If you have 543 karma, you willget 0.00100000 BTC (the base amount) plus 0.00000543 BTC (from yourkarma bonus) = 0.00100543 BTC.’ (source) The initiative does notprimarily aim at rewarding high amounts of Karma with money, butaddresses users who would like to experiment with Bitcoin.

The project has been set up by the user ‘NerdfighterSean’ who alsodeveloped the Reddit service ‘bitcointip’(http://www.reddit.com/r/bitcointip). Currently, bitcointip is donationbased (source). It allows users ‘[...] to manage money with their Redditaccount. Redditors can tip each other with a Reddit comment or message.The bot scans user comments and messages for tips of the form:+/u/bitcointip @RedditUsername $1.’ (source) In contrast to theaforementioned possibility to merely exchange karma for bitcoin, userscan actually reward particular content. In such a case, the Karma does notact as quasi-monetary intermediary, but a users’ product is rewardedfinancially. Such a system rather encourages usage strategies which are inline with topically focused approaches as described before. Seeing thelimited (one time only) possibility to trade Karma for bitcoin, the categoryof currency does not generally apply to Karma on Reddit. However, it actsas quasi-monetary incentive for some users contributions.The following comments, which came up after a user asked whether it wasstill possible to redeem Karma for Bitcoin, illustrate nicely how therelation between Karma, content-related and monetary value is (ironically)negotiated among users (Figure 12):‘is your karma clean? you’ll get ban if your karma is dirty. can someone

please validate his karma?—What’s ‘dirty karma’?—If you got themthrough reposts in /r/funny—it’s karma that needs to be laundered.’(source)

Figure 12: Reddit thread screenshot, available at:http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1qsbyy/can_you_still_cash_in_reddit_karma_for_bitcoin/?sort=top , accessed on09/01/2014

Similarly ironic are subreddits such as the Karma store(http://www.reddit.com/r/KarmaStore) where users try to exchange ‘[...]all my karma for one WHOLE kitten, please.’ (source)

The crucial difference between what has been called ‘dirty vs. cleanKarma’ is that Reddit’s encouragement of mechanisms building on largeuser amounts relates to economic factors. The growing community scale issupported by the platform as long as it is conducive to elements of thebusiness model, such as the marketplace or advertisements/sponsoredlinks. As a result, the popularisation of Reddit and the growing communityscale produce shifts in the conditions for gaining attention and selectingcontent. The conflicts accompanying such developments seem to be acommon epiphenomenon of growing communities: the development onReddit is reminiscent of dynamics on the imageboard 4Chan where onecould observe a rejection of new users who were aggressively addressed as‘newfags/cancer’ and criticised for contaminating a former, sub-culturalstatus (see “The Cancer That Is Killing /b/”, source). Even historicalevents such as the eternal September 1993 and a certain resistanceregarding the popularisation of the Usenet (source) may be seen as users’attempts to counteract growing community scales which make a platformeconomically more interesting and thus vulnerable to economicimperatives.

Similar rejections of quantifications have also been observed by Reaglewho quoted a member of the photo sharing community photo.net saying‘The whole ratings business has turned into a giant pissing contest’.Moreover, Gerlitz stated in an analysis of Klout, a tool which claims tomeasure users overall social media influence: ‘Since its launch in 2008,Klout has been object of repeated critque: mostly regarding its attempt to‘quantify’ influence and reputation, but also for its introduction ofcompetition and hierarchies to social media which once had been imaginedas flat and egalitarian.’ (Gerlitz 2012, p. 13).

In this sense, some users perceive the econometrisation of Reddit asinfiltration of intrinsically motivated participation and interaction. Such anassessment discursively also relates to anti-capitalist motivations andclaims which have been implied in optimistic views related to earlyexamples of peer production, and may still account for early stages ofmore recent projects: ‘[T]he editors of a special issue of Capital & Classon peer production noted that prime examples such as GNU/Linuxdevelopment and Wikipedia initiated a new mode of production but ‘also

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reasserted very old-fashioned trends of profit-making and the colonisationof knowledge’ (Moore & Karatzogianni 2009, p. 11). Let’s face it:informational capitalism seems to be able to handle a zone of free digitalgoods reasonably well’ (Kreiss/Finn/Turner 2011).

Users’ resistance against Karma-points as the ultimate determinant ofvalue indicates a rejection of economically optimised production practices.Similar concerns have been raised much earlier on: ‘Late capitalism doesnot appropriate anything: it nurtures, exploits, and exhausts its labor forceand its cultural and affective production. In this sense, it is technicallyimpossible to separate neatly the digital economy of the Net from thelarger network economy of late capitalism. Especially since 1994, theInternet is always and simultaneously a gift economy and an advancedcapitalist economy.’ (Terranova 2000, p. 51) The Karmawhoring-criticisms therefore relate to earlier hopes and attempts to create andmaintain production practices independent from capitalist determinationsof value. Rejections of Karmawhoring are symptoms of users’ resistanceagainst a degeneration of community-oriented interactions, economisedparticipation and content production.

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