Fediverse

Bots farmed karma on reddit because mods on some subs tied rights to participation to minimum karma. So bots were sent elsewhere, where mods were more relaxed, and farmed until they reached the target sub's karma requirement. Then the accounts were sold to advertisers and astroturf campaigns to sway posts or sell up/down votes.

Without karma there's no incentive to do any of this. I'm sure there are spammers and farmers thinking how to exploit lemmy right now. But just not having karma is a massive advantage. I still think that admins and mods should be able to see some user stat that aggregated bad behavior. Like number of removed posts, removed comments, downvotes, blocks from other users and bans from communities and instances. That way they could decide their actions based on the user reputation, as trolls and spam accounts would accrue a bad reputation really fast, and would encourage users to engage in the moderation process.