I can't help but wax philosophical about this site on my blessed 16th cake day. If only just as a personal attempt at pulling together the loose strands of thoughts I've had about what Reddit culture has become and why.

In a 1975 article on monetary policy the economist Charles Goodhart wrote "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." This has been since simplified into Goodhart's Law:

>When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

The classic example is that of a Soviet nail factory where the production quota was a certain number of nails... so the manager shifted production to producing nothing but the smallest size. Then when the quote shifted to volume instead, the manager switched over to just producing large ones. The metric gets gamed and the system output becomes warped and fails to produce anything other than what the metric effectively incentivizes.

Reddit's karma system had for a long time been a legitimately useful measure, ecause it did a decent job of reflecting what the community found valuable. It worked when the peopple earning karma were doing so as a byproduct of their actual legitimate intentional to participate, which was predicated largely on some other sort of authentic intrinsic motivation. The karma was an amplifying source of motivation secondary to whatever was actually driving folks to participate in their subs. The preponderance of participants weren't optimizing for karma directly.

Well my kind gentlesirs that didn't last. As Reddit grew, the visibility and primacy of karma grew even faster. It became obvious to a bigger and bigger subset of the population that the karma isn't the perk but the point. Those lacking much ties to any particular sub figured out that karma was a social currency that had actual utility in terms of building visibility, something akin to credibility, even. One could, if one were patient and strategic enough, manufacture an audience from scratch and then monetize it. And so the giant Reddit army, in fits and starts, has spent much of its history crossing the Rubicon into Goodhart country.

So now we have a major class of actors who have engineered the science of karma stacking without actually contributing anything in any pro-social, community-oriented sort of way. They have learned to simulate participation, either with LLM or via time-honored handcrafted techniques to produce content optimized for updoots, which is of course a deviation from the creation of legitimate community value. The Reddit nail factory is crushing them quotas.

The question is what this does to the people who came/come to Reddit seeking some sincere sense of community. The platform someone joins today is not the platform from which communities like r/askhistorians once sprung. The incentive structure has been captured such that the dominant behavioral model is one that treats community as an audience. New arrivals are learning to fish in a lake that has been overfished by people who actually hate fish but will sell you a couple packaged fillets.

I see the karma system as having been a readout of the community's health, and then the platform confused the readout for the thing itself, which is what a business with sharholders and funding does, I guess, and then the readout became endlessly optimized and then the readout became meaningless. And we're left with a system taht's great at generating karma and increasingly horrible at producing community. Moderators are attempting to protect against the erosion, using whatever tools we have and whatever boundaries we can impose, investing time toward staving off bots and bad actors, but one has scant time to build communities when so much time and energy is being spent up in the ramparts. But to what end? We can play defense indefinitely, I guess. But it seems we are defending against the incentive architecture of the site itself. I don't think that nail quota is going anywhere. Christ, this is dark. Sorry. Narwhals and bacon. Cheers from Iraq.