I think it helps that the community vibe is completely different here. On some reddit subs your posts would get automatically removed for the most arbitrary reasons, and that really discouraged people from participating. Here I haven't encountered anything like that yet and most of the people that do participate have been super cool too.
it always irked me on a new account when I couldn't comment in a subreddit because I didn't have enough comment karma. How am I supposed to get it if I'm not allowed to comment.
By posting in other subreddits that didn't have the requirement. I know it sucks but some subs legitimately need that or they'd be overloaded with bots, ban avoiders and trolls. Hope we don't get to that point in here but it's gonna be hard.
Wouldn't that in return cause the subs without those restrictions to end up receiving larger amounts of low-effort/value comments, from folks just throwing out comments randomly to try and bump their karma up enough to comment in the subs they actually want to participate in? Which means more subs instituting comment karma restrictions, and so the cycle continues?
To be fair, I don't know what the correct answer is when bots and trolls are such a problem, but I do think it was super frustrating from a user's perspective and discourages participation from people who would otherwise want to participate.
Not really, because low value comments might not get upvoted, or even downvoted in some places. What games the system is subreddits like FreeKarma4U which were specifically created for that purpose and don't mind low effort posts/comments. The answer to that has been mods of those restricted subreddits banning users participating in those karma farming communities, but it's really not a good way to address the problem.
In the end, as always, it's the bad people who keep ruining everything for the good ones.
I know, there's not really a correct answer to that problem. That one "only" inconveniences new users, so it's the "least bad".
And on a side note, if you're not in a hurry to post you can find other cool communities in the meantime. To me for example, AskOuija has been the perfect balance of "karmafarming" and actually having fun.