Karma is a great method of driving interaction, but like you’ve highlighted, it can result in a lot of unwanted behaviors.

Other social media is a good example of what to be avoided. People are driven to gather more followers and their content devolves into the lowest common denominator rapidly.

I wouldn’t mind some form of recognition for people that contribute good content to communities, but I don’t know exactly what that would look like.

As far as karma goes, we have a technological limitation in the fediverse, where your karma would be limited to the instance your user account is registered on. They could figure out how to make it work, but I’m just not sure it’s worth the effort. We have a lot of other things to focus on atm.

I think the upvote downvote system is a really great way to see what sort of ideas divide a community, as long as we can see both upvotes and downvotes. Reddit just made it a goal to farm as many upvotes as possible for that silly little Karma number to go up. I think karma (in a backend sense) could work for mods to be able to see problem users etc. but even then its still a pretty silly idea.

I hang out on a lot of informational subs and voting absolutely helps more reasonable comments get seen at the top. It’s not perfect. It can go wrong a couple of ways. But I’m surprised you’d say you can’t think of any use for it. Maybe you’re thinking about post karma and I’m thinking about comment karma.