I never implied it was such a big deal as to warrant your snark.
It's far from spam: it's a social activity. When "running" with someone, you post a comment with a count, watch your inbox patiently for the other person to post the next count, reply with the count after that, and repeat. In the process, you collaboratively climb the infinite ladder together. Hence the words of congratulations and thanks every time a milestone (a "get") is reached.
Counters can and do hold side discussions along the way; pretty much no one comes to the subreddit to act like a perfect robot. Indeed, the other person's humanity is plainly observable in the variation in their response times.
Also, the main visible karma on Reddit is post karma, and r/counting is the exact opposite of where you'd go to farm post karma, given that a new post on a given chain is only made every ~1000 counts.
Also what sort of "get" is that? They're counting, there's no game to it. Of course they're going to reach Y*0.
Gets made sense when they were chan related, your random post id having so many 0s or identical numbers.
But I mostly don't really worry about it either way, since comment karma doesn't count for much.