> I cannot stress enough how toxic the karma system is. I believe online bullying is real, flag systems, and moderators are necessary. But Karma systems are often abused by punishing users for expressing opposing views. I believe this is part of what sculpts ecosystems into echo chambers. When someone gets downvoted, no matter the reason, they receive posting restrictions, bans, etc.
4chan has a joke that browsing Reddit is only bearable so long as you sort everything by controversial. I don't think that works too well when ranking content, but for comments it's far more interesting and probably my preferred way to rank comments on Reddit.
I kind of like the idea of a Reddit-like site which hides karma, but ranks comments by "controversy". Reddit really suffers from echo-chambers and in recent years I've mostly stopped reading and participating in discussions on Reddit because comment sections on Reddit are full of people uncritically agreeing with each other. I'm fine with receiving hate online and being downvoted, but what I don't like is spending time to write out a comment presenting a different opinion only be downvoted into oblivion and receive no constructive feedback. I always try to bring an opposing perspective to discussions (even when I don't hold the opinion I'm advocating for) because I think that's generally the only way to really explore problems and break out of local-optimas in our thought process on any given topic, but this is actively discouraged on Reddit because of the karma and comment ranking system.
I also think Reddit suffers from its popularity, and to some extent, its corporate interests. If a Reddit competitor emerges it should ideally be community funded, but more importantly it should try to be selective with it's user base and avoid the common growth at all costs approach to building social networks. Generally the quality of conversation on smaller, niche subreddits is far higher because there is a less casual audience. For example, in the past political subreddits were mostly comprised of users who were really interested in politics and they were there to have high-quality conversations about the details of policies and other political topics. Today, the average user on a political subreddit is someone with a casual interest in what's happening in the world politically and therefore the comments tend to be full of low-effort, reactionary opinions. For whatever reason HN has done a really good job at remaining a reasonably niche community and has no significant corporate bias. I think that's primarily why the quality of conversation here is that much higher than on Reddit.
Just some thoughts, because I agree with you a Reddit alternative would be great.