Gay babies also breastfeed…

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 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.