Accounts involved in obvious karma grabs often show up sometime later with product "recommendations", noting that they are an established high karma account and definitely not a marketing person.

People will expend a lot of effort to optimise any metric that is seen as desirable by their social group. On Reddit, it's karma points.

It's worth mentioning Reddit uses the Karma system as part of the rate limiting. If you have a lot of karma you'll virtually never get the dreaded "You're doing that too fast" error message, but if you have a low karma account you might only get to post/comment once every 30 minutes.

It doesn't signify much as you say, but there is a minor industry of farming reddit karma and then selling those accounts for use by people who want to astroturf.

> tiny amount of bragging rights

Hit the nail on the head.

On Hacker News it's actually more significant because you unlock more powers the higher your karma like downvote

> it doesn't signify much.

Nice humblebrag, Mr. 57305. ;-)

For most people, it measures how much time they waste on the internet.

>Could you explain the significance of karma for those of us who don't use Reddit?

The accumulated internet points you gain from upvotes.

In other words atomic level validation.

Not everyone is logical in this world. Karma is like dopamine inducer to many people. High karma might make somebody feel good. It is just like a game where reaching high score generally do nothing but you know that some people want little bit of satisfaction ..?