Is the value of Reddit karma purely psychological? I know that you can sell accounts with high point values for significant sums of money, but I'm confused what the actual value is aside from the little dopamine rush you get when something is upvoted.
More entrepreneurial Redditors can use karma to signal that they know how to get posts to the front page of Reddit. Marketing companies might hire them to do promotions.
At least this is how it was years ago. Maybe marketing companies have this all automated anyway already and don't need people like that anymore.
I've never been approached about marketing once, but I am not prolific like other users. I imagine you have to be in the top 100 or 1000 users in order to get those sorts of offers. The closest I've experienced was when I organically made a post on the speedcubing subreddit asking for opinions a new cube by a fairly unknown company and I was contacted by an employee of the company thanking me for the post and offering to give me one for free.
Purely psychological. The most I've gotten out of it is that I've been active in a community for people with 100k+ karma for over 6 years, now, so I have some digital social ties that I'm grateful for.
