So you're doing something you personally believe is unethical and your argument is that we should also follow your belief that it is unethical, while we continue to do it? If you genuinely feel it's unethical, why are you even doing it? Just stop lol
Furthermore, imagine if everyone had one voting share per person, instead of whoever has the most wealth has a ton of voting shares.
It's kind of funny how close we are to economic democracy.
Friendly reminder that consent popups that don't have a clear "reject" option right next to the "accept" button are a violation of GDPR. You can report these to your country's data/privacy governmental body - for example Datatilsynet in Norway/Denmark, CNIL in France. You don't have to do it for every website that you go to, obviously, but if you do it even once you're helping solve this problem for more users than just yourself.
Others have given you some good technical solutions - personally I use the uBlock Origin + annoyance filters enabled approach, and use Firefox on Android to get the same experience there.
I mean you're assuming this isn't happening more in reverse to platform disinformation: take a look at any trans related thread in a UK sub and you'll see the most useless leap of faith transphobe comments receive 5 gold while the more scientific pro trans comments are buried far, far down the chain.
Also, equating gilding with democracy is odd - we live in a world where economic inequality is growing. Who can afford the most gold? It's not the poor/disabled/other minorities who have important views that need to be heard - they can't afford to give 5 gold to random reddit comments they agree with because they're statistically earning less.
Buying gold is not democratic. There's a reason you can't just (directly) buy votes in elections. This is still a shitty move on Reddit's part, but for a different reason than hurting democracy.
My take is this is because they were made with dithering in mind. Modern pixel art games like Iconoclasts, Eastward, Owlboy, Hyper Light Drifter, Moonlighter look pretty without dithering.
@db0 / @sunbrothersco does this fall under the low quality post rule? I'm asking this because I don't want to see !piracy becoming just as bad as r/piracy was, if it is going to increasingly be memes I'd rather find another piracy discussion place in the fediverse
I recently witnessed a porn (discussion) thread on r/feminism get absolutely nuked, so I went to check the undelete archive and all the deleted comments were basically queer people, nsfw artists, and others defending porn. The mods only left the comments that were critical of porn and basically wiped everything else. It really caught me off guard because I didn't expect such a prominent feminist subreddit to be run by swerfs.
One can even argue that the tools needed to avoid IP are already here: crowdfunding models, commissions, and Patreon-esque income, and likely in the near future, universal basic income - you can consider the government/taxes subsidising your ability to create art if you're starting from zero skills/connections/reach or from scratch with a specific project. With these, why does the author even retain total IP? Their project is funded by the community, so it'd make sense that the creator and the community had a more symbiotic relationship rather than the parasitic one where the author is effectively a digital landlord and dictator with complete control over the project.