If you click on your profile name (shown top right) you can check your 'karma' score.

No need to be patronizing. You clearly know what they mean, it’s a term that I’ve definitely seen beyond Reddit.

"karma farming" is just another way of saying "playing to the base" on any site. No one actually thinks the points here are worth anything or worth tracking.

karma is definitely a reddit term. but besides that, nothing wrong with using reddit

It started out on slashdot, the forum that invented the entire concept back in the late 90s.

It's still around, and looks alive.

I remember when Slashdot introducing the karma cap, far below my then extant karma. It mostly made karma farming irrelevant.

I also like their mod points plus meta moderation approach.

Slashdot has a karma cap now?...

(goes and logs in for the first time in maybe 10 years) How do you even see your karma now?

Is having a 4-digit UID from before the new 1998(?) green look still cool?

Ice cool

karma is a term _used_ by reddit, but it definitely isn't exclusively used there. Outside of its hindu origin, it's used by quite a few forums that track user submission/comment votes as a user score, including hackernews.

Yeah, it's literally the term used for "points" of social capital in places like HN and Slashdot before it.

HN user pg, aka Paul Graham, the (co-)founder of both this site, i.e. HN, and YC itself, the "parent" site, was probably the guy (or one of his early colleagues) who implemented the karma feature here on HN.

I am saying this because the feature has been there from pretty early on.

No need to believe me, go verify it yourself, by any means you choose.

And see:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EndlessKnot03d.png

Oh there is definitely something wrong with using Reddit after their API fiasco revealed how much disdain they have for their own users and moderators, but that’s besides the point