Eh, if you ever saw behind the scenes how much bullshit making an account wait a few days prevented, you might think different. Adding a karma limit could cut it down even more.

What made that necessary in the first place was bots. Fake accounts spamming shit, scamming, or manipulating via misinformation. Even on fairly small subs, you could get hammered a few times a week. Without automod, all of that shit was staying up until a mod could notice reports or otherwise find out, then they’d have to go back and remove shit. Automod cut the bullshit down to a bare minimum.

It sucked for new accounts, but the truth is that new users on new accounts don’t really contribute shit anyway. Nobody had enough sense to hang back a few days and get the vibe of a sub (much less reading the damn rules) before jumping in. A time limit fixes that too, and you end up not only giving those users time to figure things out, but the serious idiots would piss and moan about it, then get nasty when they weren’t given an exception, showing what kind of person they are (not the kind that contributes to a friendly, interesting conversation).

Now, some of the extremely nitpicky automod rules could be annoying even for long term users, especially when mod/s didn’t bother to include rules explaining about how to format posts to meet sub criteria.

And, it is important to note that automod rules were written by someone for a sub. There are certainly copy/paste pieces to make things like filtering out bigots easier to set up, but even copy pasting multiple rules takes time and effort to do, then verify that they’re working. So they’re in place per sub, and reddit didn’t interfere with that. They do now, or that’s the word I’ve heard, that autmod settings have been changed without consulting mods at all. But back before their stupidity, admins were hands off for the most part.

Frankly, if lemmy gets much bigger, the lack of basic automated tools is going to be a problem. There’s already bots here, some scammers, and more spam than there was a year ago. With US elections ramping up, I’m seeing some suspicious posts that look like the same kind of faked accounts that engaged in manipulation on reddit.