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I figure the Internet points were useful to a certain point. Some subreddits were set to have a karma threshold that you needed to exceed before you could post. On one hand, if you were a new user who just signed up because you wanted to ask for help on that community, not great, but it probably? went a long way to keeping out low-effort bots that would spam a self-promotional link or scam link.
At least in the niche communities I occupied, upvotes went to helpful solutions or interesting discussion points, while downvotes helped make sure that comments with nothing productive to say (for example, just "kill yourself" with nothing else included), random off-topic comments, and incorrect solutions were collapsed by default instead of clearly visible for everyone to see and get annoyed or misled by.
Once I passed most subreddits' karma thresholds I stopped caring about how much karma I had in total. But it was also nice to see how many people liked, upvoted my comments and posts that I put effort into. Discounting posting on free karma subs when I still had like 20 karma and wanted to actually be allowed to post in subs instead of autoremoved, I never really did anything with the motive of gaining internet points and it still feels surreal that enough people did for this to be a common complaint about Reddit and a "how do we prevent it" discussion topic on kbin.
I want to say thanks for helping but I sort of feel you ignored the body of my post where I say I fled kbin.cafe for its inactive admin. Just checked now and they are still inactive. On the other hand I have also missed things while reading before. I guess I'll be staying where I am at until a new Kbin instance opens up ¬_¬ I feel very odd about using Mbin given some of the drama I have seen occur over the split (my admin on kbin.run did not get involved in any of the drama for what it is worth, though), and having gotten no say in the switch, but I also appreciate the decentralization of the Fediverse and refuse to get comfy in the flagship because then I'll never move and will be part of the problem keeping it centralized. Thanks anyways.