As a moderator for /r/AskReddit (and /r/IAmA but this doesn't affect there as much), PLEASE make this optional. I remember when text-posts gained karma and it was a total nightmare for us. We will see a mass influx of low-effort & catchy posts that are designed to get upvotes. It's going to be lots of shitposting. Text posts improved BECAUSE they didn't count for karma. People making texts posts did it for the content and not internet points. The main reason for the removal was the new influx of "Upvote if..." posts. The entire front page would be full of them. Those aren't as possible anymore with the absence of /r/reddit.com but it shows how giving text posts link karma can devolve the content into crap.

We're already talking about how to harden auto-mod to help us out but we'll likely need more mods. We'll also have to deal with an influx of modmail from people who will get upset at us for removing their post that was "going to get so much karma".

At the scale we're at, we WILL feel the heat for this and as someone who remembers how things were back when reddit was even less mainstream than today, I don't see how a bigger audience is going to make this less of the karma-grabbing shitshow than it was before.

I'm really having a hard time seeing the benefit of enabling this. The points don't really mean anything and this just incentivizes the people who DO care about meaningless points to try to gain karma. It doesn't really reward good content and the shit content it garners is why the points were removed in the first place.

Edit: It's already started. - https://i.imgur.com/ZnKaaVv.png

These are just the ones mentioning it. It's not even counting the ones taking advantage of it.

Edit 2: Also, to add, this is quite a huge change to dump on moderators without any heads up what-so-ever. It's not cool to make us scramble to react to something that has an instant change on the types of users & content we receive and directly impacts our moderation strategy.