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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Programming
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What’s the point of those bots? There’s no karma to farm on Lemmy.
What is the point in farming karma at all?
You can sell high karma accounts to spammers.
Spammers don't want high karma accounts, they want higher valued accounts. Karma is just one (very easy to gain and view) indication of value. The lack of karma does not mean that spammers wont want to buy accounts on the Lemmy, just that the metrics they used to judge a valuable account are different and less transparent.
The accounts with high karma end up getting sold to businesses that want to use them to advertise (but make it look like grass roots support).
They want high valued accounts, karma is just one measure of that. Removing the karma from accounts does not remove the value of those accounts. Just changes what metrics are used to judge value. So there is still an incentive to create bots that try to create valued accounts even if those accounts are not actually creating valued content. The only question is what will businesses see as a valued account.
Though I do think removing karma is a positive as it forcing them to work a bit harder.