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.

We didn’t lose. Reddit lost us and will continue to lose.

Reddit offers nothing without its (human) users. They can chatGPT all the posts they want to try and look busy, but people are gonna notice the lack of original thoughts and leave. It will be slow and it won’t be complete, but it is happening.

Fediverse services need to lead with the “all” feed. People don’t want to be pressured to pick a server without knowing what’s on it or where everyone else is. When you go to reddit, the first thing you see is the r/all feed. The posts and content is what gets people to join.

They may have fell for the astroturfing campaign or just don’t see the issues due to not having the traffic that larger subs do. Even if they did, if they never show up on r/all, the only people that would care that they went dark, are their small communities.

Then there’s the results. Mod teams got completely gutted and replaced in the bigger subs. Why would they risk their positions and community for a site where they post for free?

Maybe they polled too. If the communities didn’t want to stay private, what’s the point?

They destroyed trust. It will take a lot of work and time to get that trust back. If that’s their strategy, their investors need to be in it for quite a long haul!

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

I’m asking if it could be developed as a feature and if it would solve some of the issues we all see.

Tipping culture used to be a courtesy, but now it’s been classified as part of salary so restaurants don’t have to pay minimum wage to their waitstaff. You’re not required by law to tip, but depending on the place, waitstaff will remember if you tip or not and how much.

Tipping has not gone away except in some places where they explicitly say it’s not necessary.

Typically I double the tax amount and leave that as the tip. I will also round up from there if it’s an uneven amount to reduce change. Finally, I’ll pay more if service is exceptional or I’m being served by someone I know personally or if they’re doing me a favor.

Some places include tips in the bill, so be careful. I also usually don’t tip if picking up food because there is usually no guarantee that my tip would actually go to the people who actually prepared my order.

I also tip other service jobs (Barbers, mechanics, plumbers, etc…)

This was bound to happen. As long as someone at reddit could override the mods, there’s no way the subs could stay private indefinitely. At least not without the entire community in agreement.

The goal is to make sure all this drama stays public so everyone sees how pissed everyone is and investors see reddit as the sinking ship it is.