Karma gave a way of guaging people reputation - if you were negative karma, because each negatively voted post only counted for a minimum of -10 additional karma, it was easy to tell if the majority of posts on a user profile were negatively geared.

Now with Lemmy, in order to tell this, you actually have to look at the posts and comments, which means you have more chances of reading them and gaining context as to why they seem to be such a contrarian.

It inherently leads to less judgement simply because it’s not as bleedingly obvious how bad someone’s comments are. Which in turn, leads to a better feel to the community and less dogpiling.

Also it gives people a greater chance to make a “come back” - they may go through a negative streak, but because people don’t discount their opinions simply because of karma score they can more easily climb out of the negative spiral as people less people will look, and those who do only look at the most recent comment scores.

Positivity breeds positivity, likewise negativity breeds negativity, often faster than positivity.