I remember the creator of the bot that does the bans insisted until he was blue in the fact that it doesn’t ban based on downvotes while spewing a lot f technobabble that ultimately ammounted to banning for downvotes. So yeah, he’s trying to bring back one of the worse features of Reddit, that being an ass kissing requirement, that’s what karma requirements are, they are an ass kissing requirement, because the way you get karma points is by kissing ass, the way you lose them is by sharing new or different ideas. See the issue with them? The system punishes people for having ideas that other people don’t like, not that are wrong or evil, but that other people simply don’t like. That’s not even mentioning people who cheat the system by doing vote manipulation to their own comments or to other comments.
Karma requirements only punish people who have different thoughts and opinions and who are honest enough to not cheat by using bots or upvoting their own comments with alts. It’s not a good solution, it punishes people who are honest and don’t commit vote manipulation. It’s why the Lemmy Devs removed score from the API, it’s still possible to get it but it’s harder, and more effort since you have to get it from each comment and post and add them up.