It's also about search engine indexing. It's happening slowly, but I've noticed Lemmy posts are finally beginning to show up in Google/Bing search results. As this trend improves, more people will stumble here by accident and then join out of curiosity.
The captcha and text prompt to join definitely helps. Having those types of simple security measures prevents people from automatically making hundreds of bot accounts, and I think is just as if not more worthwhile than verified emails for making sure that the people here are actual people.
I think the hot algorithm here is weighted better. It pulls up brand new comments on a similar weight to older comments with hundreds of points, which makes people more likely to see and interact with new comments. The Activity and New Comments post sorts also prioritize ongoing discussions, which I think is pretty cool.
Lemmy.world went under for a bit while they fixed server issues and upgraded the efficiency of the Lemmy backend, my guess is that would cause the dip in average posts.
I follow a similar philosophy, except I do downvote the mean but not rule breaking content. While it's not bad enough to justify removal, I do still want to discourage people being mean on this platform. For most disagreeable opinions, I'll either move on or reply with my point of view.
I think they theoretically can be used well, and I've tried to be more reserved in how I use them here on Lemmy, but I agree often times they can become culturally toxic. I'm glad Lemmy has a better culture so far, we're really building something great here I think.
I'm super excited for all the development here. I'm looking forward for Boost for Lemmy, but I'm also really enjoying wefwef (soon to be Voyager) and the active development is really exciting to me.
Welcome to the community. I hope you enjoy your time here, I know I have!