There were many subreddits that did not allow participation unless someone had a karma over a certain threshold. For many of them the threshold was pretty low, only meant to stop brand new accounts and trolls, but still.
Additionally, the “people who farmed it” often did so because a reddit account with a high karma score was literally worth money to adspammers and people running bots.
The karma system contributed to what made reddit bad.
I believe the devs have said they aren’t going to make it officially visible, which is all I care about. If you want to make value judgements on people based on a number so bad that you had to find a client that shows it, more power to you.
They are talking about karma as a thing you could collect, point totals for all posts added together displayed on your profile. Not the voting mechanism itself.
Doesn’t reddit not make money though? Like, if traffic resulted in them making money, I’d agree, but everything I’ve heard would indicate using reddit with an adblocker literally costs them money.
Exclusively using reddit to protest should be fine IMO, just don’t contribute anything that isn’t a protest (including voting)
It isn’t a fantasy, it’s history. It is how our comfortable world was built, and if you think it is eerie then you should reevaluate how you feel about the benefits it has brought you.
The tankies have been on lemmy longer than anyone else (and helped develop it I guess?) And they are still around. The normal instances have defederated from them and no one has to interact with them, but they still exist.
Whether you consider it a pro or a con, there are no advertisers terrified of negative brand association here, and the only way an instance gets shut down is if it gets caught hosting explicitly criminal content.
Lastly this isn’t a tankie. Tankies are insanely pro-military, obsessed with nationalism (for places like china or russia usually), and one of their favorite pastimes is denying the negative history of their favorite “communists”.
This is just a dark joke about the history of how workers rights were originally fought for, in america and elsewhere. Look up the coal wars.
I don’t see how that addresses any of what I said. If anything this seems like this would mean the subreddits that blocked people with no karma weren’t even doing it to block trolls, just new users.
I didn’t care about my karma or any specific persons, I like to get into arguments about stuff and that is how you get downvoted. I just don’t like the behaviour a karma system motivated.