In the past week and a half, I've noticed Reddit behaviors starting to try and poison all of the places that people are taking refuge in to get away from the toxicity, myself included. They've started to DDoS Lemmy for a while, which is a Reddit thing to do and what they're notorious of doing whenever they feel they don't like something.
And now they've been trickling in numbers, these incredibly toxic users that behave as they would on Reddit. The reckless shitposting, derailing open civil discussions with unfunny and irrelevant jokes. The downvote brigading and banding together to get you banned. This exact thing has happened to me on Lemmy, that I had to leave because the toxicity was gradually building.
We should reject Reddit toxicity in general, tell them they don't have a place here or anywhere. They know where they can dump their shit in, but they feel that because they've made mountains of it, that they've got to come over to other places and do it all over again.
I left Reddit because the toxicity levels have gotten unbearable. I really am yearning for a place where I can talk in and not be antagonized. I'm sure others are too.
I can talk about a similar (karma-like) system on another site. It was a wiki-style site popular from 2006-2010.
Their original system counted a user's creations and edits. There was the expected amount of drama around who had more creations vs edits. Creators tended to add a lot of high volume but low effort crap. Editors would get a lot of grief over 'stealing' entries because the idiots who created the site put the username of the last editor at the bottom of the entry.
It got worse.
Around 2008 the idiots reimagined the site and expanded the scope. They kept the shitty idea of keeping the last editor's username, but they added a points system tied to how many new features were added. For example: if you added a town you were awarded 1 point, but if you added a street or river you were awarded 1 point for each kilometer of road or river. Shit got real weird.
It was a race towards crap. AngrySteve59 was no longer at the top of the list. He was replaced by GamerJoe84 who had racked up shit points using the new system.
Points just seem to make people crazy. "Rate me! Evaluate my work" - Lisa Simpson