That is usually to avoid bots. Any normal person can easily get a couple hundred karma by just posting a bit or commenting a few times, but any bot doing the same is gonna undergo scrutiny.

True. But then you got 1 karma for every comment you made anywhere on the site and often the requirement was like 50 karma.

Restricting posts to users who have managed to make a maximum of 50 comments that didn't overwhelmingly piss everyone off isn't actually very restrictive.

I really don't buy into any of this "oh, you had to only say what people wanted you to say!" handwringing. I never once saw a user with negative karma who wasn't just there to actively cause trouble. I'm quite certain this notion that you had to subscribe to some sort of groupthink to make it through the karma system originates from a very tiny number of people who perceive not being actively anti-social in a social space as oppressive persecution of their "totally valid" "alternative opinions". By all means, show me accounts that were actually participating in good faith that were pushed out of the conversation by the karma system and I'll loudly complain with you on their behalf.

But you can't do that. Because they're always some flavour of racist nazi troll dickhead.

I said whatever the hell I wanted and was frequently confrontational or contrarian and still had some embarrassingly high amount of karma simply because I participated a lot and wasn't actively there to fuck things up by intentionally being a toxic edge-lord troll.