>>12245357>>12245397Because the original purpose of this site was to serve as a message board to generate discussion. (You)s are just a feature to that end. Karma in practice adds nothing to discussion, it was just a way for reddit admins to offload the responsibility of moderating content to the user. The idea was that good, discussion-generating content / opinions would be upvoted gaining more traction and bad, non-productive posts would be downvoted. Of course, that's not actually how it works, because when a system that was intended to curate content affects the creation of the content itself in a way that actually limits genuine discussion and promotes vanity posting, it becomes counterproductive. But it's profitable so who cares.
