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8 months agoIf you gamify something people with addiction and addiction-adjacent problems will inevitably interact with it in the gamified way. This was the first state of the karma system harming the site.
Then in the second stage once karma started getting more “serious” (preventing users from posting/commenting and being used as an “authenticity” check- what led to farmed and sold accounts) which led to a further breakdown of the karma system.
The underlying issue is despite being an absolutely useless measure in reality- the site itself ascribed value to them and caused people with (what we’d probably refer to as bad) economic incentives to act on that behavior then rationally acted.
I agree with the analysis of Biden being an unwinnable candidate, but I really think the stain that he’s put on the Democratic party is too deep now to convince the critical portion you identify as needing to come back in time. You’d have to see a near-unified front of popular DNC figures (read: Obama), respected social democrats (Bernie, Warren), party leaders, mainstream media sources (primarily MSNBC and CNN) and most of congress providing rebukes of positions and stances they’ve been vehemently screaming about for 7 months at this rate while directly throwing Biden under the bus in an attempt to pin all of this on Biden. Also many of these people have provided direct condemnations of the people they need to build their ground game. They’re trying to build their ground game through hiring- I don’t think this will work.
I see neither the party will (at the DNC level- they seem happily delusional that this will either all blow over or people will fall in line; they don’t understand this is a turnout battle), it’s main messaging apparatus (MSNBC, CNN), nor its elected representatives really even being willing to go along with the replacement plan. The only hope I think democrats have is Biden dying (which you’ve also identified). I additionally think he’s about poisoned electoral politics as the primary societal vehicle of change to a large contingent of millennials and an even larger portion of Gen Z.