Unfortunately, on reddit - when subreddits restrict new posters or low karma commenters, they're just trying to mitigate the impact of trolls and bots and people making new accounts. It's not about being elitist.

I believe it's an unhealthy habit, silencing unpopular people. Some of us low profile oddballs like to share our thoughts too

I do like the slow down, cowboy think and I'm pretty sure reddit had that extremely early on as well

One of the things I miss about reddit (and slashdot before that) was that if you got downvoted/downmodded a lot in a short amount of time, it would tell you to slow down

That was a horrible system. If you didn't get positive karma on your very first post, your account was ruined because you could never dig yourself out.

Some communities use a "santabot" to auto-ban accounts with more downvotes than upvotes. I've never seen it happen to someone who didn't deserve it.

I'd argue that low karma accounts tend to be new people or lurkers.

I always like forum setups where you had limited posting privileges until you'd had a couple of posts. Usually, they'd have an introduction category where you could post, and then comment on some other users' posts, to get your post or reputation count high enough to unlock the rest of the board.

Most Lemmy sites are small enough to have a local introduction community or other 'free' communities for newbies to dip their toes and acclimate. They'd be good places to centralize posts on how all of this works, too.

Wouldn't scale to large servers, though.

Good moderation eliminates trolls pretty quickly. Admins are incentivized to respond to users' concerns rather than a profit motive. Some communities do have a minimum account age for certain actions, and some instances require a real email address and IP address to join/participate.

Trolls are bots are rare on Lemmy. They are the norm on reddit.

Doesn't show your total on the Eternity app