In this case, its automation. It’s also a partial response to Reddits ineffectual moderator system. No-one is gunna spend all day monitoring comments from trolls and spammers on basic communities usually flooded with comments. I can’t see anyone especially truly engaged to do so in (for example, and I have no idea if these communities do this) in r/aww or r/pics or r/jokes or r/videos, which are just pretty basic subreddits that aren’t really hobbyist.

Whereas say, r/AskHistorians or some video game community or a music subgenre community likely will by their hobbyist nature attract more engaged moderators.

They will do it so long as not doing it greatly increases the amount of busywork, spam moderation and troll moderation.

Sure, but it offers at least some protection.

By low karma I mean -100 types.

The traffic on Reddit is massive for highly populated subreddits. And these subreddits that restrict low karma account activities aren’t doing it for any profit motive.

I understand Lemmy isn’t really big enough for this to be a concern here.

Unfortunately, on reddit - when subreddits restrict new posters or low karma commenters, they’re just trying to mitigate the impact of trolls and bots and people making new accounts. It’s not about being elitist.

Yeah, I often just forget to upvote generally. Although this could lead to argumentative posters making troll posts, getting engagement and trending just because people reply to them.

This may not be an inherently bad thing given that low karma accounts tend to be trolls.