Not sure if I'm doing this correctly, but I just created an account earlier today moving away from Reddit and onto Lemmy. The Reddit baseball community was one of the best places on the site full of interesting discussion, a bunch of dumb jokes, and a generally happy userbase that doesn't take the game too seriously (salty people that can't handle a loss are a big problem with a lot of the other online forums discussing baseball). With RIF's impending shutdown, I'm interested in a non-Reddit alternative. Hopefully, Lemmy is it? Are there any other baseball fans on this site yet? I searched "baseball" and found this empty community (kind of like a subreddit?), but I have no idea if this is the "real" baseball group or not.
Why? You should let each post stand on it's own merit.
First, account age is silly for Lemmy, as almost 100% of people on here will have an account creation date in June 2023 or later because this place was a ghost town before Reddit decided to kill the APIs. A month from now, is someone with an August 2023 join date automatically presumed to be a troll, or are they just someone making the switch from Reddit a month later than everyone else?
As for karma, neither negative karma nor positive karma really tell you anything about the poster:
For instance, people can make good faith arguments advocating for conservative political opinions, but because the user base skews pretty far left here, those arguments will be downvoted. A discussion forum that bans opposing viewpoints is useless, and the echo chambers on Reddit are something I'd love to avoid here.
Similarly, it's also possible to effortlessly build positive karma. Simply copy/paste highly rated comments from the last time a common repost appeared on the feed, and chances are, your copy/pasted comments will get upvoted too. You can even automate it with a bot.
Karma meant nothing at Reddit, and moderators shouldn't be using it for decisionmaking purposes. It's useful for ranking posts and comments, but anything beyond that isn't helpful.