I've had more-than-adequate karma (both post & comment) on Reddit for years, but pretty much any post I bother making about anything at all across any sub is a total crapshoot.

I can put literally hours of work in to research, media-gathering, and writing edits, and the post will get a scarce handful of reaction votes. Or I can simply post a pic with minimal info and it might get hundreds of votes. But wait! If I go back to that same sub a bit later and repeat, now virtually the same quality / type of pic will receive almost no reaction.

Posting time doesn't seem to matter. Current activity on the sub doesn't seem to matter. Mod approval on popular subs seems like it could matter, but it's hard to detect any pattern there, either. For me, it's like playing the lottery more than anything else, so I rarely bother posting anymore.

That said, I think the karma-farmers have posting down to a relative science, but I just can't be arsed to figure out what the right formula is. To my mind, it's not something a good-faith poster should have to learn.

That's what Reddit became. A place where you either post alongside the popular belief, or get downvoted to hell so no one sees what you've written or, if they do, they question your credibility as a whole. A giant fiasco, where actual discussions are completely discouraged.