The karma/upvote/downvote system encourages engagement and gives users an idea of how others perceive their posts. It also encourages people to think about their posts and it helps keep garbage from clogging up the feed.

The problem is that posts are now “attention-centric” and that might lead to people posting stuff that’s more controversial or even “rage-bait” because it gets a reaction.

But honestly though, the toxicity was always there. It’s just that now people express it with an arrow click instead of a flame post calling out the OP’s mom.

I think anonymity or at least the perception of it on the internet breeds toxicity because it’s easier to hurt someone when neither party has to look each other in the eye.

Just like multi-reddits used to do.

I’m hopeful but it will take a while. I want to see where we are in 6 months from now. Apps need to be pushed to the stores (at least on iOS).

That being said, it needs protocols for migrating instances when an instance is dead or about to die. Then there are some privacy concerns and such. It’s also not clear how it all can sustain monetarily except via donations.

But seeing the recent growth spurts and increase in new posts, I am still hopeful that this place has staying power.

Communities need ways of adding restrictions to posting. Some reddit communities used stuff like Karma counts to prevent bots from joining or even account ages. Eventually bots and spammers found ways around it such karma farming using reposts or using tools like chatGPT to generate post topics that might trick legitimate posters to upvote…

I don’t know of a foolproof way to prevent all spammers, but some kind of tooling is needed to help moderate communities and filter out obvious spammers and trolls

For the foreseeable future, I’ll use both. Despite everything, reddit still has tons of niche groups that I like to read. Lemmy and Kbin are still young and I want to see them grow, mature, and surpass Reddit, but that is not going to happen overnight.