Well, I kind of disagree with the up/down votes being inherently bad, as they more front-load early posting rather than accurate posting. Meaning early engagement is likely to have higher upvotes rather than engagement which is factual and well thought out. This incentivizes much more emotional and meme posting.

I’ve seen it happen time and time again on Reddit and even here: someone makes post, bunch of people react only to the headline, or spread misinformation, and by the time nuanced posts and thought out posts are made, engagement has plummeted and people have moved on to the next thing.

Yeah, but in this day and age we’re going to grow with easy-to-consume content e.g. memes. Once growth hits a critical mass then the niche communities will come.

I would imagine if you made karma points limited on the spender side rather than unlimited, then it might make users “try harder” to get validation, thus improving the quality of content on average.

Or it all could be bullshit and fail. Hard to say. You are right though, it’s all manufactured for engagement.

I think the only way to really fix this is to make votes a limited asset that accounts have. There are forums where this has worked okay: bodybuilding.com forums has a reputation system where accounts are limited in what they can give to other voters.

As long as “karma” is unlimited it suffers from the same problems whether you count it in aggregate or not. As some other commenters have said, people still seek validation in individual comments. I know because I do too.

You’re right. Reddit was naive to expect that people would give a positive value to something they inherently disagreed with.

Of course, now they’re going to punish people who agree with things that Reddit doesn’t agree with.

No, originally they were supposed to be for content that contributes and added value, even if you didn’t agree:

But the amount of “came here to say this” and “haha epic updoot for you sir” has made it pretty clear that the karma whoring was for agreement.

It’s the reason there are echo chambers now.

Don’t get me wrong, the original intent of the upvote/downvote system died a year or two after Reddit started, but Reddit always maintained that upvotes and downvotes weren’t for agreement.

Reddit finally admits that upvotes and downvotes are for agreement and disagreement.

I could just rattle off random words and they’re probably real distros somewhere