So people care about karma for they same reason they care about likes. As to why I think there are 2 big reason: People want to give other people some content to make their day better. Likes are a kind of psychological reward to the ones who made the post, it makes them feel good that others like and approve of them.
For its part, Reddit helped to assuage censorship concerns by letting the Tienanmen Square post be officially dubbed the most-upvoted Reddit post of 2019. But t... more