I've seen Reddit devolve since 2014. Look at /r/all and it almost resembles a Facebook feed.

There are several annoyances that made me switch:

• More and more people posting low-effort, stupid short jokes that tend to gather lots of upvotes instead of giving an actual answer
• The upvote system likely causes subreddits to only have one view. If your opinion doesn't align with that view, it will be downvoted and hidden. Opinions that align with that view will float to the top.
• The stupid new awards system with coins and all that kind of rubbish. When it just was Reddit Gold, it was fine in my opinion. It was simple,, it helped out Reddit, you could buy it for yourself or gift it to someone else and most importantly, it wasn't hidden behind a virtual currency to make the real cost of awards ambiguous and easier to spend.
• The enormous focus on growth by making Reddit accessible to people who were thrown off by the old design. I feel like the big influx of new people by this changed the Reddit culture instead of those new people adapting to the Reddit culture that was there.
  • People writing "I have a question" as their post title. Just state your question in your post title.
  • People posting a link to an image and then writing the actual post as a comment. Please just make a self-post and link your image in there if it is necessary.
• Subreddits starting to require email verification on your account (looking at you, /r/linux).

Combined, these made me search for alternatives. The thing that I liked the most about Lemmy is that it is federated, so that became my main alternative. But I'm afraid that if it gets too big, that it will get the same problem regarding upvotes as Reddit has.

The side-effects of upvotes (or likes, by extension) are a though problem to solve, I think. You can do without them them, like some image boards. But on some of those, like 4chan, you'll get people who post not for the upvotes, but for the amount of replies they can get. This simply ends into many flamebaits being posted. Look at /g/, it's not about technology in half of the threads, but simply about transsexuals in a transphobic way, because people take the bait, get angry or join trolling and end up replying to it. The poster gets their dopamine kick and the janitors (moderators) seem to enjoy it as well. The other half of the post simply are text editor X is better than text editor Y and other similar. And then there are threads baiting with sexually provocative images, again, to get people to reply.