Hey, I’ve got unpopular opinions. No, it’s usually someone who is trolling.

It’s far from perfect but of the people I’ve seen, they are usually so bad that they are damaging dialogue, not fostering it.

Usually it’s eventually reversed if they are not a troll. People here are pretty decent and upvote most things.

I think there might still be one or two apps that show a total.

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.

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.

Exactly - Reddit specifically and intentionally uses dark patterns to reinforce the importance of karma at every turn. The first interaction that someone has with Reddit is usually “you don’t have enough karma to post/comment/vote in this subreddit.” There are secret communities and public awards for high karma earners. There is a frontpage dedicated to rapid karma-earning posts. There is no disincentive for karma farming reposts, and subreddits are actually punished for reducing reposts. Karma is commoditized.

Here the votes still matter, but the algorithm is public and users can and do sort in a variety of ways to discover new and relevant content. There is no single “front-page”

Me after a night of partying

I wonder if there is a list of Joe Rogan guests or an AI summary of the episodes. Also, Snopes covers a lot and won’t rot your brain.

For political content, be aware of the instance you are posting in. Lemmy.world is pretty good, but will often remove any posts about political violence, including guillotines and “Luigi” content. Lemmy.ml will remove content that is critical of communism, including Russia and CCP.