Gamifying the voting incentivises people to make low quality posts and comments. That’s why Reddit is now basically just rage bait fake stories with comment chains that all look exactly the same. And now it’s all just ai generated anyway.
I sometimes visit and read the AITAH type stories and I’m dumbfounded that people can believe or enjoy reading them. All the subtleties and nuances of the early days are gone and it’s a race to who can karma farm the hardest.
The other thing that made Reddit great in early days were the small communities being visible on the front page. It made the content varied and there were different types of posting hitting front page. I think Lemmy is struggling with this because politics is just so loud that we don’t have enough volume of other content being made.