User karma isn't factored into the site's sorting algorithms. Post score is, and that influences karma, but not the other way around.
edit: On reflection, you may have been referring to the ability to post, rather than the popularity of the post. In that case, the misunderstanding was mine.
You have to warm up accounts with a few comments over a week before they start showing up.
Mods essentially have two variables to work with: account age and karma. Some subs do set minimum karma (I've stumbled upon some that wouldn't accept below 2k karma), but most just go by account age to prevent banned users from going around the ban.
And a tip for spotting karma farmers: just go to one of those big subs that accept screenshots of tweets. If the screenshot has engagements/timestamp cropped, click on a profile. Like 8 times out of 10 it's gonna be an older account that never posted before reposting one of the older popular submissions.
EDIT: Here's an example that took me like 20s to find: https://www.reddit.com/user/DepartureSimples/
Are you sure? How do you know this?
Source: Don't have a persistent reddit account, just made a new one for the few times I wanted to post something.
This doesn’t match my experience of reading Reddit
I just headed over to one of the popular subreddits and randomly picked an account that posted a top meme
https://www.reddit.com/user/esberat/submitted/
The account has 8 million post karma and every single post it submits to a subreddit ends up on the front page of Reddit... without fail.
The account isn't a mod of any of those subs, but they're clearly using upvote manipulation to get every single one of their posts to the front page.
This is analogous to SEO, but rather more insidious and sneaky. You can spot SEO blogspam from a mile away. You don't know if a Reddit user is a real person, a bot, or a company's representative.
I'd wager you could do a lot to influence public opinion with just an upvote ring, without the botted accounts actually needing to post messages.
That was your first mistake, the defaults are cesspools full of karma farming bots. Nobody goes to those for advice.
I'm sure it happens a lot regardless, but the vast majority of content in those is still just from regular people. You can tell by the information posted as it tends to be more or less truthful and useful. Once it stops being that it'll be obvious enough. Like when Russian bots invade your average Ukraine related r/worldnews post.
That's the magic of Reddit, 4Chan and every other cesspool where any niche is only a slight URL change away from any other niche.
It's trivially easy to add niche subs 2, 3 and 4 to the list of places that you target.
2) You can tune these systems to be indistinguishable from a flesh and blood product fanboy at first glance. Not all spammers drop the same comments mentioning their product everywhere. You can dilute it with meaningless AI generated banter so the mod has to scroll through a couple pages and connect the dots before deciding whether you're a bot or just an idiot who happens to like some product.
Take r/mechanicalkeyboards for example, arguably a niche community. The enthusiasts there are very motivated to buy new things and are willing to pay quite a lot of money for them. Place a few of your bots there to promote your artisan keycaps and watch people pay top bucks for them.
Well, if "nobody" goes there, how are the bots able to farm karma? Who's giving them the views and upvotes?
I guarantee you anything that's the "default" is being visited by many, many casual visitors, people not "in the know", and people who don't recognize karma farming bots for what they are.
Also how the fuck "Building a hobby-shelter while camping in Kelowna" or some random funny pictures is "astroturfing"?
The prime reason I created a reddit account many moons ago was to get rid of all the default and behemoth subreddits from my feed, as they all looked like incredibly toxic and I´d have jumped through a window if I had to stay in them for more than 5 min. But these subreddits are all of reddit for many other people. And some user might only ever be looking at porn. And some others live in a diy bubbles.
That is to me the beauty of it, but also why it´s difficult to generalize trends. Low karma accounts getting shadowbanned ring nothing in my mind, but as there´s subs where you can only submit post titles ´cat´, there sure must be others were karma is everything.
> It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.
It's used more as protection from SEO spammers and this is just unfortunate side effect for new users.
Other problem is that karma is global which basically means user on popular subreddits will gain it quickly so any karma-based filtering is doomed to fail anyway
User karma has no impact on the default sort ranking[0]. The source code is available here (as of ~2018): https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/l...
> And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.
User karma is impacted by mods' use of AutoMod on a per subreddit basis or fraudulent[1] accounts, but otherwise there is no site-wide application of user karma.
Source: I spent some time experimenting and implementing alternative rankings at Reddit.
0: Subreddit hot score, not applicable to logged in users' default feed.
1: Shadow banning (vs direct banning) fraudulent accounts makes it more difficult to reverse engineer signals used to identify malicious accounts.
> Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses
It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.
Basically, Reddit's system is terrible.