There is already a total count of up- and downvotes, but please never add karma to Lemmy. We don’t want to deal with karma farmers and minimal karma requirements to post. I don’t care about the moderation issues because karma brought more harm than good. Please never add that bloody dreadful thing to Lemmy. I already saw a bunch of people supporting adding karma to Lemmy, which will turn Lemmy into a cheap Reddit clone and karma-farming hell. Please, never add karma to Lemmy. I beg you. No more karma hell.
I’ll play devil’s advocate: one benefit I could see to Reddit’s karma system is that it can quickly filter out spam or alt accounts from more serious communities.
The first thing all spambots on reddit does now is repost comments in sports subreddits to build up karma, so it really doesn’t help much.
Account age or number of posts could serve the same function. (Not perfectly, but neither does karma.)