The Rollout of Reputation Service : RedditEng
As the home for communities, one of the major responsibilities of Reddit is to maintain the health of our communities by empowering those who are good and contributing members. We quantify someone’s reputation within a Reddit community as their karma. Whether they are an explicit member or not, a user’s karma within a community is an approximation of whether that user is a part of that community.
Today, karma is simplistic. It’s an approximate reflection of upvotes in a particular community but not a 1:1 relationship. Under the hood, karma is stored with other attributes of users in a huge account table. Currently we have 555M karma attributes at ~93GB, and they are still growing over time, which makes it very difficult to introduce new karma-related features. In order to better expand how karma is earned, lost, and used on Reddit, it’s time for us to separate karma from other user attributes, and that’s why we want to introduce Reputation Service, an internal microservice.
https://preview.redd.it/a0a0k2rrnu371.png?width=1600&format=png&auto=webp&s=0eda20cfa74cf47069e187ccb455ff017b138e59
