Personally core belief that people create and breed the toxicity. Use any system you want if people behave toxic it will become toxic.

I think that the current downvote system is far from ideal, and ideally there should have some piece of "forced" feedback when you downvote someone, but keep in mind that a downvote is just "this should be less visible". For example, people often downvote OK answers because an even better answer popped up, and they want the later to rise to the top. So a lot of times there's no actual hostility in the downvotes.

And for other Reddit behaviours that people often call toxic (I call them SNOO - stupid, noisy, obnoxious, obtuse), I think that it's cultural. The Reddit admins bred that behaviour into the users; and users are likely to carry it with them elsewhere, including Lemmy. I think that most of those individuals will get better over time here, and the ones who don't will end leaving.

It's a distilled version of 'the wisdom of the crowds'. With all the dog piling that comes with reactions to things that are pointed at the wrong audience. There's generally some people with baggage in there somewhere who will take issue, and you get downvoted.

However, what's always interesting about these platforms is where good ideas rise, where they come from, and how controversial they are, all of which you lose with the twitter/mastodon architecture.

It may be easier to find your crowd, but how useful is that to you depends on what you use your online presence for.

The karma/upvote/downvote system encourages engagement and gives users an idea of how others perceive their posts. It also encourages people to think about their posts and it helps keep garbage from clogging up the feed.

The problem is that posts are now “attention-centric” and that might lead to people posting stuff that’s more controversial or even “rage-bait” because it gets a reaction.

But honestly though, the toxicity was always there. It’s just that now people express it with an arrow click instead of a flame post calling out the OP’s mom.

I think anonymity or at least the perception of it on the internet breeds toxicity because it’s easier to hurt someone when neither party has to look each other in the eye.

IDK, I think most of the toxicity comes from when something gets popular. I never read much into the votes on reddit because it's usually more influenced by when you post than what you post. If you combined all the karma of my accounts it'd probably be in the millions but mostly I was just trying to either help people or make them laugh, never cared much about the points.

“Toxicity” is just like “racism”, newspeak to censor and bully, if you need to mention it you are the one doing the harm

Not necessarily toxicity, but echo chambers. Echo chambers could then be used to be toxic.