That's a really good way of looking at it actually and I agree. The community is kind of filtered by only people who care enough to leave reddit, but also I think there is an aspect that we're trying to escape the consequences of the karma system on posting/commenting behaviour.

I've always thought that having accounts that showed your total number of upvotes incentivises posting the same in-jokes endlessly. Bot accounts with high karma can even be sold to people who care about having a high karma account.