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 have never been sure what the point of caring about karma is. Pretty much it only gives a rough idea of how long an account has been open and how active it’s been. 5, 50,000, 500,000? 5 Million? Who cares. It’s not like you can do anything with it besides see the number change. I never have really seen anyone comparing karma or caring about other people’s scores.
The only real thing it did was set a way for subs to disallow posting by new/troll accounts. There could easily be a way for lemmy to calculate a sum of votes on someone’s most recent posts if people thought that was a useful or desired feature.