I’m not sure what the solution to this is to be honest, the more I think about it the idea of voting on comments is probably just a bad idea all together for what I want out of lemmy and clearly my desires and priorities differ from the overall user base of this software. I used forums for years with no voting and I’m not so sure why this needs voting on every comment because reddit had it. I understand that if there are millions of anonymous users you need a way to sort and this is crowd sourcing what is interesting, but, maybe this isn’t needed at all with only a few hundred users who are all participating in good faith.

I don’t know about how other instances operate but even though I have open sign ups, I can account for every account or have had good interactions with the random signups that have come through. I check up on the users on the instance to make sure newly accepted people aren’t trolls. It isn’t so hard for me because of the scale. Maybe this is the ideal scale and Lemmy as a whole needs to do more to convince people like me to pay for hosting instances and convince their friends to participate then organically grow in this way. People who use lemmy (mostly without contributing) appear obsessed with growth because they want to replace reddit, but I’ve been around lemmy for year and it isn’t and will never be reddit. The issues with lemmy.world and scaling fast, having to develop sublinks for features and whatever people are trying to do just doesn’t reflect how I want to use social media. When they get to that scale they’re going to attract people who are just looking to scroll an app while they take a shit and those people aren’t really going to participate in my cooking community.