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.
you could say the same thing about linux, but its growing and evolving because of the various avenues that use it.
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.
Reddit could operate without subreddit moderators. The main reason mods exist is to remove abusive users and bots, both of witch could be handled by the vote system.
Reddit requires moderators in order for the business of Reddit to function.
no they dont. they literally have a system to democratically promote or suppress posts.
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.
You can always trust a large cooperation to keep your data secret more than any random individuals. They have accountability for losing your data, much more so than the people on the fediverse. A big data breach leads to class action for reddit, here it just takes down an instance and lowers the validity of the technology.
The difference is that you can take reddit/Twitter/Facebook to court over violating your privacy, you won't have anywhere near that kind of luck with fredeverse hosts. If you notice, there isn't really a TOS, those are filled with regulatory agreements from governments that says what they can and can't do with your data. Here we're hanging with our ass in the breeze. Best solution right now if you want to receive DMs is to use an encrypted app and block all DMs here.
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.