Reddit is intentionally designed to do this, the entire basis of downvotes is to allow communities to collectively marginalise ideas which makes them pointless to even bring up
The iteration prior to Reddit was order by entry. Order by vote was an innovation that (ostensibly) culled a lot of the pure crap (FIRST POST!, Ad spam, shameless troll posting).
And even then, people would periodically engage with downvoted or buried content, when it was in relative good faith.
The bar for conversation online was low, but Reddit was - at least at one point - a place with some of the best discourse around in no small part thanks to the karma weighting system.
What really wrecked the site was a combination of bots and native advertisers. Once karma was properly monetized, a system that was biased-but-functional collapsed back into walls of shitposting and ad spam.
The iteration prior to Reddit was order by entry. Order by vote was an innovation that (ostensibly) culled a lot of the pure crap (FIRST POST!, Ad spam, shameless troll posting).
And even then, people would periodically engage with downvoted or buried content, when it was in relative good faith.
The bar for conversation online was low, but Reddit was - at least at one point - a place with some of the best discourse around in no small part thanks to the karma weighting system.
What really wrecked the site was a combination of bots and native advertisers. Once karma was properly monetized, a system that was biased-but-functional collapsed back into walls of shitposting and ad spam.