The label is pejorative when applied to someone's behavior externally and I am saying that even if you don't care about labels applied to you by others, karmawhoring is unlikely to be a good strategy for yourself.

What I meant by that is that it seems unlikely to me that someone would identify "I did X because of Karma, and X is something I endorse" as karmawhoring. So, by definition, doing karmawhoring is unlikely to be a good strategy- like murder is guaranteed to be illegal, but killing is murkier.

You are saying that karma is better correlated with "effort involved / value-added" while I'm talking about "readership and impact"

To me, value-added is basically readership and impact, except with the readers giving some feedback on whether the impact was positive or negative. If you get a lot of people to read a random string of characters, and so you waste part of their day, this is a loss over those people not noticing a random string of characters that you generated.

That section was mostly the empirical claim that number of comments is a bad proxy for the value generated by the post, whether you use karma or readership or some other metric. I mean, if you want more comments in your posts, put in more typos (in order to not annoy your readers, have only one typo, and when someone comments with a fix, edit in a new typo), or instigate political fights in the comments.