this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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Lemmy
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Fun fact: while not being exactly like what karma was on Reddit, Lemmy does store the total count of upvotes-downvotes your account has received. You probably can't see it because it isn't shown by the frontend (the website you see), but the data is indeed there.
It's an essential component of algorithmic sorting. Even on Reddit the total isn't important, it's your history of regularly getting approval or other users that counts, not the absolute number. In fact giving more weight to high karma value would just created a positive feedback loop when sightly more upvoted accounts, get exponentially more exposure and this would break the sorting algorithm.