I just realized that lemmy doesn't have karma like reddit. I've never paid much attention to karma. But even so it does seem to play an important role in moderation on reddit.
For instance, many subs put a karma restriction on who can post which helps decrease trolls.
And while it's true that karma gives an incentive for people to seek karma I think it's overall regulatory principle might be worth considering as a trade off.
Well, the Voyager app shows a comment score and a post score, I like to have just that. The karma system was flawed because the accounts with the most karma where mostly repost bots. Karma restrictions didn't do anything because of that.
I like that you can see both upvotes and downvotes. I always deleted anything on Reddit that went below one karma here I don’t have that urge as I feel at least one person agrees and I feel like I can be my true self instead of always conforming to the sub.
Universal karma wouldnt work for gate keeping or weighting in a federation anyway. Since the internal activity of each server is opaque to the others, theres no practical way to verify that karma reported by a different server is genuine and not internal bot activity or just manually edited by the server owner.
It sort of had. Boost for Lemmy used to calculate and list it untill recently. Not only for yourself, but for others as well. And deleting comments didn't regain/lose any karma. It stopped doing that though.