they do a lot more “tell, don’t show” than old movies

Geez the Netflix Avatar adaptation (a show, not movie, but still) was so bad for this. Despite actually having more runtime and fewer distinct plot points (due to the removal of and consolidation of different side-plots) than the cartoon it was based on, it spent less time showing us why characters think and feel how they do, and straight-up told us every single thing.

Lobby for voting system change. Then vote third party.

A vote for third party might as well be a vote for Trump, if you do it under FPTP.

First, I doubt that. Even with all the tooling available for mods on Reddit, being able to access a user's overall karma or subreddit karma was really useful for moderating. Including the tools accessing that karma count.

But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, even if that weren't true, and future mod tooling for Lemmy was going to magically solve the problem, removing that tool now is pretty poor. Better to leave it and remove it only once it is no longer necessary.

Yes, it really was. It wasn't perfect for the reasons you describe, but it certainly was a useful extra tool.

Karma was also a really handy tool for mods to keep away bots and trolls.