The karma/upvote/downvote system encourages engagement and gives users an idea of how others perceive their posts. It also encourages people to think about their posts and it helps keep garbage from clogging up the feed.

The problem is that posts are now “attention-centric” and that might lead to people posting stuff that’s more controversial or even “rage-bait” because it gets a reaction.

But honestly though, the toxicity was always there. It’s just that now people express it with an arrow click instead of a flame post calling out the OP’s mom.

I think anonymity or at least the perception of it on the internet breeds toxicity because it’s easier to hurt someone when neither party has to look each other in the eye.

Thankfully the instance I'm on doesn't have downvotes. I find what leads to toxic communities is when admins don't remove toxic content or users.

Not necessarily toxicity, but echo chambers. Echo chambers could then be used to be toxic.

Personally core belief that people create and breed the toxicity. Use any system you want if people behave toxic it will become toxic.

NO! YOU SUCK!

More seriously: downvotes can be disabled on Lemmy instances on an instance-by-instance basis. I have them disabled on mine, for example, because I too find them difficult to deal with. If you don't like downvotes, that could be an easy solution for you.

I think that the current downvote system is far from ideal, and ideally there should have some piece of "forced" feedback when you downvote someone, but keep in mind that a downvote is just "this should be less visible". For example, people often downvote OK answers because an even better answer popped up, and they want the later to rise to the top. So a lot of times there's no actual hostility in the downvotes.

And for other Reddit behaviours that people often call toxic (I call them SNOO - stupid, noisy, obnoxious, obtuse), I think that it's cultural. The Reddit admins bred that behaviour into the users; and users are likely to carry it with them elsewhere, including Lemmy. I think that most of those individuals will get better over time here, and the ones who don't will end leaving.