There's some misinformation floating around regarding Lemmy not having a karma system. While many have discovered otherwise, this is for those who may not have.
While it's not exposed in the Lemmy default user interface, Lemmy does have a fully functional karma system and it is visible in third party clients such as WefWef and Memmy.
Honestly is it even worth anything? Even on reddit I didn't really pay attention to how much karma a user had, maybe when I wanted to check if it was a bot or something.
When it comes to gauging advice, or doing something like buying or trading used goods it was helpful as a proxy for trustworthiness. Older accounts with good karma are a lot less sketchy than brand new accounts.
Not talking about votes on specific comments. Talking about profile aggregation. I've done vinyl trades, clothing swaps, hired people to 3d print things, etc. For those kinds of interactions you aren't looking at the quality of one specific post, but want to validate that it's not a temporary account for a scam and that the user generally cares about the reputation of their name on the platform.
I’d check sometimes whether someone had a history and how long their account had been around, but 18,000 vs 80,000 or 800,000 is super meaningless to me. Personally I’d delete my accounts every 1-6 months. It was a pain to start over but after that, so what. Reddit is practically anonymous. Posts and comments stand on their own to me… it’s not about the reputation of the author.