Please post content that matters to you, not to what you think the audience want.
This. I think the existence of karma and people's natural obsession for building a "brand" and profile with statistics you can watch increase as you satisfy your audience led to a performative aspect of posting and commenting which resulted in a hive mind mentality and degrading of quality to the lowest common denominator. You see this in popular music, airport books, mainstream media, Hollywood remakes and sequels, housing developments, cars and appliances, Amazon products, and plastic surgery recipients. I'm not sure what the solution is, up/down voting is a very good solution to the old school forums/BBSs that were cluttered with junk, but I think not having karma for posting or commenting on the fediverse is a good first step. I think having the freedom to jump federations and defederate is also key as well as the ability to aggregate/"view all" across all sites allows people to see everything all at once to avoid FOMO.