I use it the same way I did on Reddit; it's a decent gauge in how willing I am to engage with that person. If their history is littered with downvoted posts, then I'm less likely to engage because it's more likely they're being inflammatory on purpose.
Karma systems don't make places worse; the value placed upon them by the users does. It's not meant to be a counter for how liked you are, it's supposed to be representative of how you interact with the community; bad karma for bad interactions. But people use downvote as a disagree button, and people spam posts cause "big number make feel good". Good idea, difficult implementation given how humans work.
I agree that’s what it supposed to be, but nobody really treats it like that. Downvotes are treated as a “dislike” button, despite the fact that it should be “this does not contribute meaningfully.“
Regardless of what we want, that’s just how people operate.
Reddit has a karma sum which is used to deny access from posting altogether. Here if you say something unpopular, you don't get the dopamine hit from upvotes, but you're also not silenced, unless the mod explicitly bans you.
While I agree unpopular opinions often get shouted down, i think people often forget that sometimes what they consider an “unpopular opinion” is unpopular because it’s abhorrent or just wrong lol. Not every comment/idea is valid and deserves to be entertained.
Being anti-vax is unpopular in a lot of circles and I am perfectly happy with seeing those comments downvoted/ removed and the users banned.
How are you not silenced exactly like you would be on Reddit? People downvotes posts and comments they don't agree with exactly like reddit, but here if the admins disagree they defederate entire instances over it. Hot page is completely useless compared to reddit, so only the most upvotes posts from the most popular subs are visible, and comments have the exact same issues reddit comments had. Nothing about this system is mechanically different from reddits system, baring how votes get totaled because of federation, (also the hot sort is uses).
Even if the numbers don’t carry elsewhere in a meaningful way, seeing the high positive number next to your post still means that other people agreed with/liked what you said on that particular post/comment. And that alone can give a mild dopamine hit.
Less useful for bots trying to farm rep for nefarious reasons, more useful for real people who can feel the joy of a moment.
I'm on connect for lemmy and also have a total count on my profile page.
Actually, isn't it up to the client? The dev can decide what to feature in the profile page. The fact is, every user has points for posts and comments. Maybe they are just adding the numbers up? Afaik Reddit had some other maths behind the karma count