That's a poor way to measure karma since people downvote significantly more liberally than they boost, and boosting isn't a thing on lemmy.
GankTopPlz
Does it let you use it on specific users? Some bots would be useful to put it on. I know of a few that post relevant videos automatically or aggregate game API data that would be good to add to a few subs.
in theory, you can exclude anything that is a text post, but a lot of the content posted on sum subs that you want are self posts. like sports post games, weekly resets in games, or transcripts of twitter threads.
It became a problem because it meant they were forced to bow down to advertisers instead of leaning into user funding. Discord has leaned into user funding very heavily, but I don't know of any other social media that is more funded by its users than it is by ads and is regularly used/promoted, at least in the US.
mods had unilateral control over their communities until very recently. short of doing anything illegal or breaking TOS, mods could ban whoever they wanted for any reason. what stopped this was the fact that communities would riot if mods were to ban random users they simply didn't like. look at places like /r/latestagecapitalism, /r/blackpeopletwitter, /r/witchesvepatriarchy, or /r/conservative, they will all aggressively ban users or block users from posting if they do not go through verification or disagree with the group think. and the community loves it because they're stuck in their echo chambers.
Reddit hires staff to do moderation
and if your neighbor hires a lawn care service, you should be paid?
Right, but you also can't create a work agreement where one was explicitly denied. It's like mowing your neighbors lawn then asking them to pay you, but they told you they wouldn't pay you if you did it before you started. It's the same with the 3rd party app devs too. While I think reddits actions are insane and detrimental to the health of the site, they are fully in their right to deny those devs access to their API and their site as a whole.
the problem is that reddit doesn't give more than -15 on any given comment and 0 negative karma for posts. you can just go around pissing people off and make up for it with 1 post saying the obvious meme. not that given no karma for getting upvotes seems better though.
and reddit has it in their TOS that no one who is a mod is an employee of reddit.
yeah, but you need one to win.
they don't have a contract, they're screwed.
do not fool yourself. this place is just as strong with the group think mentality. if you want proof, look at all the defederation discourse.