AltForHonesty

The karma system generates soft-censorship, self-censorship and groupthink. If you write a critique on a post with high-karma authors, they can just strong-downvote it and delete it from the frontpage, which just leaves you with less karma and voting power in the future (and other people can see your low comment-to-karma ratio, or the little icon indicating it, and dismiss you).

People with more voting power can downvote people they disagree with giving them less voting power (and thereby less voting power they can distribute to other people of similar sentiment... ad infinitum) while conversely upvote things they agree with giving those people more voting power (and thereby more voting power they can distribute to people they agree with... ad infinitum).

And that's not even going into the fear of retaliation in EA social/funding circles.
I don't expect this to be solved, because the people who have this undemocratic power in the community don't want to give it up.

I finally created this account so I can post some of the critiques I always self-censored, while having this account act as a sponge for all the downvotes. This doesn't solve the problems with the karma system even a little bit, but at least I have an outlet for my honest thoughts.

EDIT: It seems like my comments are not showing up on the frontpage. Not too surprised tbh. Oh well, at least I tried.

EDIT 2: A couple days after messaging the mods, they said I should try again. My comments on community posts are still being hidden from the frontpage, but at least the other ones aren't. Still, that means that any time I write a criticism on a community post the people I'm critiquing can just reduce my voting power most likely without anyone else seeing the critique.
How is this not at a form of censorship?