God I hated all the joke comments that wound up at the top with thousands of upvotes. Just one big circle jerk on many serious topics. I’m sure it’ll still occur in Lemmy to some extent but hopefully the lack of karma will help keep it down.
I’ve got the same with Memmy. I think these apps just add your upvotes and downvotes together to give you a score. Reddit, on the other hand, had a complex karma system, where the more upvotes/downvotes your post would get, the less those would be worth, so you couldn’t just get a massive karma score from just a couple popular posts
There is a score kept in the backend, it just has no frontend in default lemmy and only exists if instance devs want to do something custom with it. Some apps are probably using it.