Yeah, and like, if all you have to do is post a bunch with auto upvotes on to get rep, is that rep real? Isn't it a lot more real if other people have upvoted your stuff on purpose, not you? As valuable as that even is anyway

See, I always thought that felt really weird when Reddit did it, I never liked that. To me, if a post has zero up votes, that should mean either no one has seen it yet or that everyone who has feels entirely neutral about it, it's right at 0. If there's at least 1 upvote, that should mean at least 1 person found it good, and if it's negative, at least 1 person thinks it isn't. To start that total at 1 instead of 0 feels arbitrary and like designed to be less intuitive, not more.

Like someone said above (but making the opposite point from them here), if you didn't like it, why would you post it? You having posted or commented at all is evidence you meant to, have you ever commented or posted by accident? There's intentionality there by default, I don't see why it needs the auto self-upvote to start with.

I had an account that was over 10 years old, but didn't actually have a ton of usage; I didn't have a lot of posts that got upvoted, I think I had under 1000 karma. But I don't regret deleting it at all.

I regret that, ideologically, I don't want to ever reward the leadership there with my patronage in any way, which means there's a ton of content sitting in their archives that I don't want to access now. If I ever had to, I could, but I'd rather do anything else first. Just look what management did; they don't deserve the reward of attention, clicks, or especially additional free content generation, far as I'm concerned.

I guess they were almost right, in a very backwards, stupid way; the main value for me doesn't lie in the users, but in the content. Unfortunately, you can't screw over the users that generate that content in good faith, no matter how much you think you can sell that content for.