When I first found out it was an interesting concept that I was pretty neutral on but the more I engage/lurk with the community the more I enjoy it.
I generally don’t post/comment much on Reddit because I tend to be extremely sincere and that’s not always well received. Usually I don’t get much hate, but what I do get is a lot of non-interaction mixed with downvotes. And it’s just really discouraging when I’m just trying to share my thoughts.
But having no downvotes here is so nice because I’m not afraid that I’m going to get silenced into oblivion. Either people will actually engage with me (and maybe disagree, but in a meaningful way), or they’ll move on and not randomly share their disdain via downvoting.
It’s such a small change but makes a big difference. I bet a lot of people feel the same as me - it’s more comfortable to engage here.
I think that will turn out to be really important in the long run. The gamification aspect of karma score let to posts and comments leaning more to the quick and funny, and less to long and thoughtful. Especially in bigger subreddits. And then bots started to just repost and reuse previous highly upvoted stuff to boost their numbers even further.
I’ve mentioned my thoughts on this a few times now, but you’ve summed my opinions up nicely! I tend toward longer, overly-drawn-out comments and replies, so it was kind of pointless for me to comment on stuff on Reddit. It went entirely against what was promoted by the culture on Reddit, which developed as a result of turning comments into a popularity contest. If you didn’t have a gimmick (ShittyMorph, poem_for_your_sprog, shittywatercolor, etc.) then you were basically stuck using jokes, references, and acerbic jabs to try to get attention (as evidenced by karma). Even downvote farmers fell into this pattern, they just did the opposite of what the typical person would do, which resulted in even more toxicity.