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You could still do that if the karma wasn't displayed.

How do you envision this working?

Sort by karma, but don't display it.

How does that solve the problem?

I don't mean comment karma, I mean user karma.

Hmm, are people really looking at their total user karma?

I admit that seeing my comments get upvoted gives me a hit of dopamine, knowing that that number of people were interested in what I said.

However, I never look at my TOTAL karma, just each individual comment. I like knowing that THIS thing I said people agreed with.

I never look at my own karma either but then I'm also not actively trying to increase it. But reddit users do tell us themselves that they post things specifically for the karma. They also do things like post screenshots of threads instead of the threads themselves to get the karma from those posts.

There is a whole host of behaviors on reddit around acquiring user karma.

For individual post karma, I'm the same as you.

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