Asklemmy

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.

Personally core belief that people create and breed the toxicity. Use any system you want if people behave toxic it will become toxic.

IDK, I think most of the toxicity comes from when something gets popular. I never read much into the votes on reddit because it's usually more influenced by when you post than what you post. If you combined all the karma of my accounts it'd probably be in the millions but mostly I was just trying to either help people or make them laugh, never cared much about the points.

Not necessarily toxicity, but echo chambers. Echo chambers could then be used to be toxic.

“Toxicity” is just like “racism”, newspeak to censor and bully, if you need to mention it you are the one doing the harm