They are talking about karma as a thing you could collect, point totals for all posts added together displayed on your profile. Not the voting mechanism itself.

It isn’t a fantasy, it’s history. It is how our comfortable world was built, and if you think it is eerie then you should reevaluate how you feel about the benefits it has brought you.

The tankies have been on lemmy longer than anyone else (and helped develop it I guess?) And they are still around. The normal instances have defederated from them and no one has to interact with them, but they still exist.

Whether you consider it a pro or a con, there are no advertisers terrified of negative brand association here, and the only way an instance gets shut down is if it gets caught hosting explicitly criminal content.

Lastly this isn’t a tankie. Tankies are insanely pro-military, obsessed with nationalism (for places like china or russia usually), and one of their favorite pastimes is denying the negative history of their favorite “communists”.

This is just a dark joke about the history of how workers rights were originally fought for, in america and elsewhere. Look up the coal wars.